Like Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, The Queen of Katwe is an intimate and heartrending portrait of human life on the poor fringes of the twenty-first century.“Irresistible” is one of those adjectives that critics should handle with utmost care.
But to reach that goal, she must grapple with everyday life in one of the world’s most unstable countries, a place where girls are taught to be mothers, not dreamers, and the threats of AIDS, kidnapping, and starvation loom over the people. Phiona’s dream is to one day become a Grandmaster, the most elite title in chess. In September 2010, she traveled to Siberia, a rare journey out of Katwe, to compete in the Chess Olympiad, the world’s most prestigious team-chess event.
Of these kids, one stood out as an immense talent: Phiona.īy the age of eleven Phiona was her country’s junior champion and at fifteen, the national champion. At first they came for a free bowl of porridge, but many grew to love chess, a game that-like their daily lives-means persevering against great obstacles. When he left at night, slum kids played on with bottlecaps on scraps of cardboard. Laying a chessboard in the dirt of the Katwe slum, Robert painstakingly taught the game each day. Katende, a war refugee turned missionary, had an improbable dream: to empower kids through chess-a game so foreign there is no word for it in their native language. One day in 2005, while searching for food, nine-year-old Phiona followed her brother to a dusty veranda where she met Robert Katende, who had also grown up in the Kampala slums. Phiona Mutesi is also one of the best chess players in the world. Phiona has been out of school most of her life because her mother cannot afford it, so she is only now learning to read and write. PHIONA MUTESI sleeps in a decrepit shack with her mother and three siblings and struggles to find a single meal each day.
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