THE KINGS ARE ALREADY HERE

With her commitment to dance under question from the head of her school's faculty and from her mother, 15-year-old Phebe is assigned a summer break from her rigorous ballet school and sent to Geneva, where she can stay with her father, director of an agency that aids refugees, and still attend classes. There Phebe meets Nikolai, a teenage chess prodigy who is in a similar quandary over his future; the two characters alternate as narrators. Convinced that only a former world champion named Stas can turn him into a grandmaster, Nikolai has, at Stas's insistence, extradited himself from his overbearing father—only to have Stas disappear. As they all search for Stas, Phebe senses the limits of Nikolai's life, and by extension, the confines of dance. She realizes she wants more than "having to choose between only failure and Brava," while Nikolai struggles with what it means to play beautifully (like Stas) or to play to win (like his father made him). As in her My Heartbeat, Freymann-Weyr creates charming, intellectual characters, and the issues with which her protagonists struggle are complex and cerebral (though readers might find the issues here less immediately engaging than the exploration of love and sexuality in her previous novel). Neither Phebe nor Nikolai spells out their full stories; instead, they reveal ideas, opinions and bits of information about their families over the course of the narrative. Readers willing to submerge themselves in the novel will be rewarded with fully articulated characters and fascinating views of their rarefied worlds. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)