REVIEW: Bold Moves by Emma Barry

KaetrinB Reviews / Book ReviewsChess / Contemporary / documentaries / NetGalley / second chanceNo Comments

Content notes: reference to the opioid crisis

She moved to Musgrove after her junior year and went to the local high school where she met Jaime Croft. He was the high school golden boy, moneyed, gorgeous, talented.

Scarlett is and always was, prickly and defensive. 

Scarlett only had herself and her smart mouth, and so she had to wield both like weapons. If she didn’t, she might fall into the trap of imagining that she was defenseless.

She didn’t want to “date” Jaime. He didn’t want her to be a dirty little secret but he’d take what he could get. It didn’t stop him inviting his “friend” over for dinner and he was never ashamed to be seen with her but Scarlett drew boundaries he had to respect. Jaime was deeply in love and completely wrecked for her. He used his influence to get a school chess club started and funded so that she could begin to live her dream.

Shortly after Jaime graduated from high school, his wealthy, respected, doctor father was arrested and later gaoled, for trafficking oxycodone and Jaime’s life was thrown into turmoil. His mother didn’t quite know how to cope and his younger sister needed support. Scarlett was off to Tokyo to compete in her first international tournament. Jaime needed to stay behind to look after his family. Scarlett, for her part, loved Jaime deeply (still does) but couldn’t see a way forward for them.

Now, 17 years later, Jaime is a successful documentary/film-maker, having made an Emmy-nominated documentary about his father and the impact of what he did on the community around them. Given a virtually unlimited budget from “Videon” he approaches Scarlett to make a series about her autobiography, Queen’s Kiss. To date, Scarlett has resisted any and all efforts to adapt her memoir for the screen. But Jaime… well, he’s different.

Both Jaime and Scarlett bear scars from their earlier relationship. Jaime doesn’t understand exactly what went wrong between them and and Scarlett has a secret (which is not too hard to figure out, or at least get within the vicinity of for readers) which she is sure will change everything if Jamie knows.

The deal they make though is that they will write the script together and because reasons, this happens in Musgrove.  They live together in Jaime’s house while they’re writing and over the course of the weeks they’re working so closely together, the connection between them only grows. They’re like magnets, always drawing each other closer and it’s only a matter of time before the pull between them is too great. 

Even though it looks from the outside that Scarlett is the difficult one in the relationship (and it’s not untrue), Jaime has his own demons to deal with. He has built his life, since his father’s arrest, on competence. On looking after everyone else and protecting everyone else. He even helps in Musgrove, trying to make amends in some way for his father’s sins. He runs a local support group for families of incarcerated persons. He visits his dad regularly. His dad, who will likely never leave prison. Not alive anyway.

Jaime knew he’d made his own mistakes in not realizing what his father had been up to, not being able to stop all that harm. That was exactly why he always strove to be competent and in control. He never wanted to miss anything that important ever again. He had no excuse for being ignorant now.

Jaime! You were just a kid!! Give yourself a break!

But Jaime doesn’t really give himself a break. He holds himself to an incredibly high standard and he tends to have tunnel vision about certain things.

So, when that secret Scarlett was keeping comes out, he reacts badly.

The story then skips ahead some months until filming of Queen’s Kiss the series is to begin. Scarlett is the chess expert on set and is also an executive producer. So they have to be in each other’s space all the time again.

I don’t want to give away too much because spoilers, but there is another time jump after filming to when the show is to air. That was my disconnect with the story; so much time in between each act. In terms of page time, there was no gap at all – the story focused on when they were together or about to be. But I kind of hated that they were apart for so long, more than once, marinating in angst and being unhappy and/or angry with one another and pining.

Somehow, he was going to have to make those four months on set enough to last a lifetime. Maybe he could find a way to snip up the way she made him feel and sew it together into a quilt, one he could huddle under when she left and the nights were cold again.

It felt a little disjointed to me too, even though I understood the why of it in the narrative.

Scarlett learns to let people in – something which Jaime says is his biggest issue with her (but is it really Jaime? Or, is it more about you?) and Jaime takes far too long to get the stick out of his butt over things and understand why Scarlett did what she did and to let Scarlett protect him sometimes rather than him being the one always in charge. Yes, he was mostly lying to himself but I was surprised as his own lack of insight, all things considered.

There is a rich subtext to why they each do what they do and how they feel about one another and a melancholy to the overall tone of the story. In many ways it’s a story of missed opportunities and “what ifs” as much as a story of a couple destined to be together finally getting it right.

As I’ve come to expect from this author, the writing is very good, with strong word play and tight allusions. I especially liked this one which was apt on a number of levels:

Them together forever wasn’t some absurd sci-fi thought, like a functional Congress or a natural deodorant that worked as advertised. It could happen.

It could totally happen.

Bold Moves was set in the world of chess but readers don’t need to know the game to understand the story. There’s chess in the book but it is completely accessible. I had the sense that the documentary making/film-making part was realistic also and I appreciated the sensitivity the author had about the opioid crisis and the damage of it. While it wasn’t my favourite of all of the Emma Barry books I’ve read, it was a solidly enjoyable book and one which, thinking about it later, has even more layers to it than might initially meet the eye.

Amazon

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