The Inheritance Games
by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

My rating: 2.5 / 5
Genre: YA mystery, romance

When Avery Grambs finds out she’s been named in the will of a recently deceased billionaire, it turns her world upside-down, especially considering that she’s been practically living out of her car. On top of that, in order to be eligible to inherit, she has to live in Tobias Hawthorne’s massive estate for a year. The only problem is that the rest of his family still lives there, and for the most part, they aren’t happy with this young usurper. It doesn’t help that no one knows why the fortune was left to Avery at all. But one of Hawthorne’s grandsons explains his grandfather’s love of puzzles and suspects that Avery is just another puzzle to solve…if only she can survive long enough.

I went into this book expecting to be bothered by the teenage drama. I liked the idea of the mysterious inheritance and puzzles and such, but I’d read enough reviews to decide that it would probably be too angsty for me. Then my daughter got it for Christmas and read it and loved it, so…well, now I had to at least give it a try. And yeah, I got about what I expected. The story isn’t bad, but it’s so bogged down by the “romance”/love triangle. Every time Avery is in a room with one of the two middle brothers, she practically quivers. There is no chemistry or romance, really, just…way too much physical attention and tension for my preference. So since the actual story of why Tobias Hawthorne left everything to Avery takes a backseat to an aspect I didn’t like at all, it’s understandable that I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I could have.

Then the resolution to the mystery was incredibly lackluster—one might even say non-existent—so that detracted from my enjoyment even more. I think that some of the issue is that I thought the answer to why Avery was given the entire Hawthorne estate was the story goal for this book, but really, it turned out to be discovering who is behind some attempts on Avery’s life. But that means that either the set-up isn’t done very well, or I just didn’t follow along very well. I plan to keep reading the series, not so much because Barnes hooked me with this first book but because my daughter loves the entire series and says some of what I didn’t like about this one gets better later. For now though, it’s difficult for me to recommend this book to anyone, but I do think I might have liked it more if I’d read it as a teenager. And if you read my review and don’t feel that what bothered me would bother you and you’re interested in the story, you might consider trying it out yourself.

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