Grandmaster by David Klass overall, is a pretty good book. I think this one would suit the ‘outcast’ in the class, but I can see some students being disenchanted by how overly serious and competitive the characters get throughout the novel.
This novel follows the main character Daniel Pratzer over the course of a few days (probably about a week tops). Daniel is a freshman who decided to join the schools highly popular (?) chess club. However, he’s not very good yet. The plot twist comes in when the older, more popular boys (who are also better chess players) invite him along to a weekend father son chess tournament, but only if he brings his dad to participate. Daniel brings home this information and finds out that despite his dad never being interested in anything he did chess related, he actually used to be a grandmaster chess player. The rest of the novel follows the ups and downs the two experience over the weekend, including all of the mental health issues that come up as Daniel’s father experiences the high levels of stress from the game.
This book could be a useful platform if you want to connect it with stress, overachieving, self-pressure, etc. or as I stated above if you’ve got kids who actually play chess (or something similar) competitively. I can see this being popular among the quiet nerdy boys in the class, but I am just hesitant to suggest it for book groups as it does talk about how Daniel’s father tried to commit suicide, injured/attacked others, and suffered from poor health effects as a result of the stress from competing.
Overall this book gets a 3.5/5 from me! I’d suggest using it as a class read aloud for middle school (6-8) that way you can deal with scenes as they arise in your class.
Until next time!