Deborah Makarios

Our heroine is a sheltered princess, and rather naive as a result - not her fault, as she's been intentionally lied to by a well-meaning but very wrong-headed aunt. She belatedly discovers that she's not just going to be able to show herself before her adoring people on her 16th birthday to be crowned queen - in fact her evil uncle is now thoroughly in charge of her realm and isn't likely to tolerate her survival.

Also her uncle has turned the former ecotopia into a capitalist hellhole. I'd actually quite like to see more books deal with the meaty aftermath of such wholesale destruction, and the difficulties of recovery, but that's perhaps less easily made into a digestible narrative than the part where the plucky heroine gets herself in and out of trouble several times with the aid of a reluctant sidekick-turned-devout love interest, until finally she's in a position to confront her nemesis. This book does a perfectly good job of that.

(I'm not sure the chess metaphor in the title/blurb were really justified by the plot, which was more of an underdog-collecting-the-plot-tokens than a manoeuvring match between equals. The gift of the chess-set near the end attempted to explicate the metaphor somewhat but it felt like an afterthought rather than something deeply embedded from the start. Perhaps as a pretty weak chess one-time amateur I missed something though.)… (altro)