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This fictional text tells the story of Randall, newly arrived in Rushport after his parents' divorce. Randall is worried that his first summer vacation in his new town will be unbearably boring. Although he's made a new best friend, Max, and has plans to take swimming lessons, he wants a project to occupy his time as well. Both he and Max agree that a chess club would be fun, but what starts out as sounding like a simple plan quickly runs into problems, including interference from Gordo, the class bully. The book includes realistic black and white illustrations, a table of contents, a simple guide to playing chess, and an author's note with chess resources.
- Genre: Realistic Fiction
- Text Structure: Narrative structure with 11 chapters of multiple detailed episodes related to a single plot
- Content: chess, summer, bullies, divorce
- Themes and Ideas: Family and peer relationships, problem solving, connecting with a new community
- Language and Literary Features: Multiple characters, main character changes over time, descriptive and figurative language, plot with numerous episodes, building toward plot resolution, multiple points of view revealed through characters' actions; wide variety in showing dialogue, both assigned and unassigned
- Sentence Complexity: Variety in sentence length with some longer, more complex sentences, sentences with nouns, verbs, or adjectives divided by commas
- Vocabulary: Some words used figuratively, some longer descriptive words, some new vocabulary, unexplained in text
- Words: Many words with three or more syllables, all parts of speech, words with suffixes and prefixes, words with a wide variety of complex spelling patterns, many plurals, contractions, and compound words, some words divided across lines
- Illustrations: Black and white illustrations
- Book and Print Features: Ample space between lines, words in italics and capitals to indicate emphasis, sentences continuing over several lines and onto the next page, full range of punctuation including dashes and ellipses, table of contents, chapter headings, author's note, how-to section
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