Another solid book. Chess-playing boy and ballet-dancing girl tell parallel stories to good effect. Freymann-Weyr can really get inside the heads of the serious kids, and make a compelling story out of what she finds there. ( )

"The Kings are Already Here" is about a young girl Phebe, who is a dancer. Her whole life she has trained to be a dancer and goes to a ballet school. However, she is fifteen and she is starting to wonder what else is in the world. She does not know if dancing is her real passion anymore. To decide, she moves to Switzerland to live with her dad, Clarence, and take dance lessons there for the summer. There she meets Nikolai, a sixteen year old boy who is an avid chess player. They embark on a journey together to find Nikolai's trainer. While on this journey they are both discovering who they are and what is most important to them in their lives.

One teaching connection is that of other cultures. This book gives an interesting look at Switzerland and its culture. It has interesting characters that give insight to how different people act and how others act in different culutres. A second teaching connection is that of coming of age. Every young person struggles with who they are and what they want at Phebe and Nikolai's age. This book is a good story to read that shows how these two discovered and opened up themselves to new things.

It took me a little while to get into this book. However, once I was interested it was very good. It had interesting veiwpoints and concepts and I have never read a book like it. I do not love this book because I did not liked how it ended, but it still was an interesting read. ( )

Although I thought the plot was very original, I had a lot of problems with this book. Both narrators' voices sounded the same to me, and I found it hard to grasp the reasoning behind their actions. I’m also not really clear on just when this book was set—sometime during the Cold War I think, but during the sixties, the seventies, what? This was, however, an intriguing glimpse on the inside of both chess and ballet. ( )