Elsa’s Chessboard
by Jenny Andrus; illus. by Julie Downing
Primary    Porter/Holiday    48 pp.
4/25    9780823454082    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780823462254    $11.99

Chess and a chessboard become defining features of a young Viennese Jewish girl’s life at the turn of the twentieth century. Elsa, age six, loves to watch her three brothers play the game, begging them to teach her. After one of them does, “Elsa thought about chess all the time.” For her tenth birthday, her brothers give her a portable chess set. She plays and grows, one day falling in love with a chess-playing librarian, who later flees with her and their daughter—and her chessboard—to the United States when Nazism threatens. Chess becomes a way for German-speaking Elsa to make friends with her polyglot coworkers in San Francisco. Basing her story on her grandmother’s experiences (with some coming “from my imagination”), Andrus pens an economical, heartfelt narrative. Downing likewise invests her watercolors with thoughtful details. Particularly effective are occasional four-panel grids that offer tiny montages, such as one depicting a white-haired Elsa with her granddaughters, playing “the games the girls loved”: cards, checkers, Twister, and, at Hanukkah, dreidel. She’s lost her chessboard during a move, a sorrow brought home by a double-page spread of Elsa in her darkened bedroom, tracing her late husband’s face in a framed photo. Readers will be as happy as Elsa when the chessboard is rediscovered, its longevity documented in one of the family snapshots that accompany an author’s note and recommended resources about chess.

From the ">May/June 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.