The Inheritance Games
Ratings491
Average rating3.9
3.25
This book was alright. Easy and fun to read.
A lot of things happen that feel unnecessary and don't quite fit in the overall story... So instead of it moving the story forward or making it more interesting, it slowed it down and made it a bit dull and boring, I feel like. Some things in this book make me furious too, but that is because I am not the target audience (YA is not something I really enjoy anymore).
my new favorite book! if I could, i'd give it 6 stars. love the story and all the plot twists, from the minor ones to the most important ones.
Great book! However,didn't like the fact that there were over 90 chapters! They are working on a TV Miniseries! David N.
I read this book in pretty much one sitting, currently I am reading the sequel. I think this book is a great mystery which would be perfect for middle schoolers. Especially for those curious kids. I loved the characters and the storyline.
If you're a fan of puzzles, you'll love this.
A clean YA with interesting characters and a mystery to solve.
Not usually a fan of cliffhangers but this one will lead into the next book nicely.
Total escapist fun, a YA Knives Out. The characters are never deep enough to emotionally invest in but the mystery/game is fun and the end solves the why of the inheritance but sets another piece of the family mystery afoot. This will definitely sell to mystery/puzzle/game fans.
I'm a big fan of YA books, so I loved every second of this one.
I thought it was well written and I loved the riddles/clues and twists and turns!
I don't think I would've wanted to be in Avery's position, living in a huge mansion with no idea who could or couldn't be trusted and danger at every turn! I found myself feeling sorry for Avery because she really was thrown into the deep end.
The Hawthorne brothers were interesting. Grayson was really hard to like initially, but he (very slowly!) grew on me. My favourite was definitely Xander, the youngest Hawthorne brother.
Thea, on the other hand, was a real annoyance, although a lot of it might have to do with being Zara's (One of Tobias Hawthorne's daughters, who wasn't very happy about Avery inheriting the Hawthorne fortune) neice.
A few questions were left unanswered, but it looks like there will be a sequel, so hopefully these questions will be answered in the next book, which I will be waiting very impatiently for!
Thank you to Jennifer and Pigeonhole for the chance to read this book.
I highly recommend this to anyone who loves the YA genre.
What is The Inheritance Games? When it comes to games, some are just that - games. But for some, like the inheritance game, riddles can lead to important information, and maybe an entire fortune! Avery is a normal girl, living in very not normal conditions. She excels in school but is living in her car - after her half-sister allows her abusive boyfriend to move back into their apartment.
When she is informed that she has been named in a will, she is shocked. She does not know the person who has left her a substantial fortune, but her life has changed - and she is not sure if its a good thing or not. While the money is nice, she is thrust into a world that she does not know or understand. It is not every day that a 17-year-old girl inherits 42 billion dollars. The biggest challenge of all is going to be whether she can survive the family or not...
Come along for a great adventure and discover what happens when you inherit several billion dollars, anger an entire family, and discover secrets and riddles every step of the way!
My Thoughts On The Inheritance Games:
Oh my goodness! What a book! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one, and actually read it in on sitting - I could not put it down! I was hooked from the start. I loved all the different riddles and the many different layers of the book. From the rough start, and the “I am not sure where this is going,” to a complete turnaround, this book is one that has several twists. Those Hawthorne boys though - danger in suits! Could you trust the brothers? No? Who could be causing so many of the issues, and how do you navigate something you have no idea as to what is going on?
I have a feeling this is going to be an instant hit with anyone who reads it! I can't wait to share it with everyone I know!
Put this one on your must-read list - its the perfect weekend novel!
The beginning of the book was promising, but after the will was revealed, I found the world-building to be somewhat dull. The atmospheric setting could have been crafted more effectively with the use of words. However, the book managed to regain my interest towards the end by introducing more intriguing puzzles. This made me realize that it lacked the quantity of puzzles I had anticipated. I longed for additional dark and atmospheric depictions of the property and its libraries. The scenes were too brief and left me wanting more, but not in an exciting manner. I certainly desired more descriptive details.
I'm glad that I wasted time only on one book in this series. The only positive thing about it is that it has short chapters. Everything else was so boooooring.
Avery - your usual special snowflake that knows it all. Hawthorn brothers - brought me some weird flashbacks of F4 from Boys Over Flowers. Why weird - because there is little in common with them, but I was reminded about that kdrama nonetheless.
As a reader, I expected to solve the puzzles along with mc, but there was nothing for me to do. All answers to any mystery or riddle was right on the next page. This novel haven't build up to anything.
I've read endings of the second and third book and I'm happy that I missed all the drama and Santa Barbara of who is who's son/daughter.
With the trilogy ending I had the same issue that I did with ready player two - the world issues don't go away if you throw money at them. Even if there are gazillions of dollars.
Isn't it everyone's dream to inherit a ton of money? Love this book. Love all the riddles and the hunt to solve them.
“Sometimes things that appear very different on the surface are actually exactly the same at their core.”
I have heard nothing but great things about this book and more specifically, this series.
This was such a fun read. It was chaotic and had me laughing at the most silliest things. I can see myself in a lot of these characters, (minus the great wealth, of course). The idea that someone like Avery and Libby, who struggle with money, horrible men and only surviving by pay check to pay check, becoming billionaires overnight was such a cool idea to me. It felt like I was reading the Underdogs finally succeeding.
It was so much fun trying to figure out the puzzles and clues along with the characters. It made me feel apart of the story.
I think it's always good to go back to your roots with Young Adult because there's something so nostalgic and comforting about the genre. It's easy to get swept up in the daunting realism of other genres so it was nice for me to feel some escapism in a world that would never include me whilst still having real feelings brought into it.
The ending? I actually gasped
I am super excited to read the other books in this series and see what comes next.
Took me a while to get into the story and it seeming almost too focused on romance off the bat, but that quickly changed and I loved the entire process, puzzles, and mystery.
Dnf 55% I was expecting riddles and puzzles but unfortunately this was just boring. Not awful just boring.
The brothers all melded into one (didn???t care about the romance subplot) and none of the characters made much of an impression other than Libby who I disliked, and Max who was annoying with the fake swear words. If it had been a standalone I might have persevered, but with a cliffhanger there didn???t seem much point.
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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WHAT'S THE INHERITANCE GAMES ABOUT?
We begin by meeting Avery, a high school junior on a mission. She's determined to get through high school without drawing a whole lot of attention (good or bad), to fly just under everyone's radar—but to do so in a way that'll pick up enough in scholarships to get to college and get to a stable and lucrative career (in actuarial science). Once she's there, she can take time to breathe, time to relax. But not until then—now it's about studying, working, and hopefully getting to help out the older sister that she lives with.
And then a mysterious—and obviously stinking rich—stranger shows up and tells her to get on a plane to Texas where she needs to be at the reading of a last will and testament. She knows no one in Texas, has never heard of the deceased, and can't think of why she needs to be there. But hey, it's a free trip for her and her sister (and she's curious about the will).
The deceased is Tobias Hawthorne, a billionaire. With a B. He was the richest man in Texas and among the richest in the world. It turns out that he's left almost everything to Avery. If she can live in his mansion (the word mansion doesn't seem to cover it, but English doesn't have a word that'd actually describe the place) for a year.
The difficulty in that lies in the rest of the household—there's the staff who don't seem all that welcoming, Hawthorne's daughters and son-in-law who clearly resent the interloper, and Hawthorn's four grandsons (all around her age) who were the presumptive heirs before she came along.
Avery and the grandsons (and, actually, pretty much everyone in the world once the story breaks) just want to know one thing—why her?
THE CHARACTERS
I've been thinking all week about how to talk about the characters in this book, and I think the best way to get a handle on them is to think of them in three tiers (and as soon as I write that sentence, I think of a way to separate them into four, or maybe five, so admittedly, there are problems with this approach, but I'm sticking with it),
Tier One is simple: Avery and the four Hawthorne grandsons—Nash, Grayson, Jameson, and Xander. They aren't as all well-drawn as the others (Avery, in particular), but any time they're around, the reader and the scene focuses on them over everyone else. The novel is about them, everyone else is a supporting character. More than the other Tiers, each of these characters has an obvious goal, an obvious storyline, a motive to find out what Hawthorne was doing with this will. They're three-dimensional characters (Nash could use some more definition, though). It's hard to like them all consistently, but you can't help but be curious about each of them.
Tier Two consists in Libby, Avery's sister; Oren, her security chief; Alisa, the lawyer/primary contact with Hawthorne's law firm (and Nash's ex, but that's another story); and Max, Avery's best friend (who she only communicates with via text and telephone throughout the novel). It occurs to me that this group consists of people that Avery trusts (maybe she should, maybe she shouldn't, but they haven't given her a reason not to). We know them a little better than the rest, but the focus on them isn't as great as it is on the Tier One characters. Of these, I really wanted more time with Max—and hope that the story will allow more interaction with Avery and Max in the sequels.
Tier Three is everyone else—people from their schools, consultants/employees of the estate, and well, anyone else who shows up. Most of these are little more than names and titles—some are filled out a little bit, but few are more than a two-dimensional sketch. If they get more than two dialogue lines, they're interesting, and you typically want to know more about them and hope that Barnes finds an excuse to use them some more (with the exception of Libby's boyfriend, who you just hope never to hear from again, every time he makes an appearance). Some of these may be trustworthy, but you have almost no reason to trust anyone on this Tier (Libby's boyfriend is the exception—you have absolutely no reason to trust him). This is an interesting quirk of this world—there are precious few people that the sudden-heiress can trust, everyone has an agenda dealing with her, usually a hidden one.
Of course, looming over everything is the specter* of Tobias Hawthorne. As he's dead, I don't count him as a character. But his personality, his achievements, his machinations govern everything. As Xander notes (and Avery frequently remembers), even if she'd manipulated Tobias into this, she'd find he was manipulating her all along.
* Not literally, this isn't that kind of book.
You take the large cast of characters that this represents, using them all (particularly Tier Three) as pieces of the puzzle themselves–and all of them providing multiple clues of various quality to the big question, and the word “complex” almost doesn't cover the nature of this puzzle.
A THOUGHT ABOUT GENRE
I keep seeing references to this as a thriller. It is absolutely not a thriller. There are moments that could be seen as belonging to that genre, but they're so brief that they don't count.
This is a puzzle, this is a mystery, this is a mental exercise, a riddle. It's practically a cozy (closer to one than it is a thriller, anyway).
That's not a criticism of anything but the marketing. But anyone walking into this should not be expecting pulse-pounding tension, breakneck speeds (although it is generally fast-paced), and nail-biting action. This novel about the characters, it's about figuring out motives, and the meaning of various acts.
SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT THE INHERITANCE GAMES?
I picked this up just to read a chapter or two in order to get a flavor for it, then I was going to put it down for the evening, and pick it up again the next day. I ended up reading 30% of it before I had to stop—and read almost another 20% that night. It's engaging, it's smooth, it's so, so, readable.
The pages just melt away and you get swept up in the story—as outlandish as it is. Without any effort, you not only suspend your disbelief, but you put a gag on it and stuff it in a closet somewhere.
There's a definitive end, a puzzle is solved, and there's a sense of resolution. Which is immediately replaced with the next puzzle and a promise of more to come in the sequel. So while I don't think you can call it a cliff-hanger, you can definitely see the cliff just ahead on the path.
I'm a little annoyed that I saw The Westing Game referenced a few times in the marketing for this book. Because I really wanted to talk about the way that this had a similar feel to The Westing Game and be able to come across as insightful to do so, Instead, I'm just part of the echo chamber. Still, there's a very Westing Game-vibe to The Inheritance Games, and as there are few books that I consider as clever, as well constructed, and as readable as Raskin's book, that's a high compliment.
This is just a fun, fun read. Pick it up.
My thanks to The Write Reads for the invitation to participate in this tour and the materials they provided via Penguin Random House Children's UK and Netgalley.
4.5/5
wow i loved this
BUT i swear if i see this girl Emily mentioned one more time in this series, I will scream
This book in one word: FUN. Usually puzzle mystery books are not my favorite but this book had me hooked within the first few chapters. This would make the perfect book for a book club with so many layers and unanswered questions to unpack throughout the entire book!
Overall a fun read but it dragged in a few places. The twist was instantly recognizable early on in the book, but I'll still probably pick up the second book. 3.5.
predictable. i started the book LAST YEAR and finished just now with like.. 4 chapters remaining. could've been shorter imho
Maybe I'll give it a try again but it just read very juvenile, the characters felt one-dimensional, and the “game” aspect was thrown out for a boring romance.
That was a cliffhanger! The games were creative and the writing was well paced so it felt like the same thrill as the characters. On to the next!