Bingo: “I”
Seventeen year old Avery is on the ropes. Her mother has died, her father is nowhere around, and she’s living with her beloved sister until her sister’s abusive boyfriend moves in. Refusing to live with him, Avery moves into her car. What she doesn’t know is her life is about to change drastically.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s The Inheritance Games is a YA novel. Her heroine Avery is visited by a member of the fabulously wealthy Hawthorne family, and told she must be present for the reading of the grandfather Tobias Hawthorne’s will. Avery is bewildered–she doesn’t know the Hawthornes or have any idea why her presence is required.
To the family’s shock, at the will reading Avery is granted the majority of Tobias Hawthorne’s 42 billion dollar fortune. She must live in the Hawthorne mansion for a year and then she officially becomes the heir. Hawthorne’s family, including his four grandsons Nash, Grayson, Jameson and Xander, are shocked and appalled. But the will is airtight, so Avery (and her sister) move in, overseen by a lawyer and a bodyguard.
With the Hawthorne grandsons–especially Jameson and Grayson, who are close to Avery’s age–Avery begins searching for clues to the mystery of why she’s here and why she inherited the fortune. She gets caught in a love triangle with Jameson and Grayson, which is quite tedious and for some reason squicked me out. There is a lot of longing looks and bodies responding and it’s just cringe. It’s a major plot point so there’s no working around it.
The way the characters uncover the clues to the mystery is mostly absurd. For example, Tobias Hawthorne left a note that refers to a bunch of proverbs, such as the “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Avery and Jameson interpret that to mean they should search every book in the mansion’s multiple libraries–of which there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of books–to find a book whose contents don’t match its cover. It’s a ridiculously impossible task which they manage to successfully complete. So many of the clues are vague or unlikely to be solved, but somehow the characters manage to unravel the mystery. Many of the steps they take to discover the next thing are illogical.
But I don’t want to be an old grouch. The book was kind of fun, too, and kept me engaged. The preposterous ending clearly leads to the next book in the series, which I may or may not read, I haven’t decided. All told, it’s a quick, light read where the reader should suspend their disbelief and just go with the flow.