Was it necessary? No. Was it fun? Yes.
Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Jennifer Lynn Barnes for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary book and media kit!
Book Information
Publishing Date: August 29, 2023
Four brothers. Two missions. One explosive read. Jennifer Lynn Barnes returns to the world of her #1 bestselling Inheritance Games trilogy, and the stakes have never been higher.
Grayson Hawthorne was raised as the heir apparent to his billionaire grandfather, taught from the cradle to put family first. Now the great Tobias Hawthorne is dead and his family disinherited, but some lessons linger. When Grayson’s half-sisters find themselves in trouble, he swoops in to do what he does best: take care of the problem—efficiently, effectively, mercilessly. And without getting bogged down in emotional entanglements.
Jameson Hawthorne is a risk-taker, a sensation-seeker, a player of games. When his mysterious father appears and asks for a favor, Jameson can’t resist the challenge. Now he must infiltrate London’s most exclusive underground gambling club, which caters to the rich, the powerful, and the aristocratic, and win an impossible game of greatest stakes. Luckily, Jameson Hawthorne lives for impossible.
Drawn into twisted games on opposite sides of the globe, Grayson and Jameson—with the help of their brothers and the girl who inherited their grandfather’s fortune—must dig deep to decide who they want to be and what each of them will sacrifice to win.
Book Links
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62804258
- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Hawthorne-Inheritance-Games/dp/0316480770/
- Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-brothers-hawthorne-jennifer-lynn-barnes/1142336901
- IndieBound: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-brothers-hawthorne/18946056
Content and Trigger Warnings
For a list of warnings, tropes, and representation for this series, check out BookTriggerWarnings.com.
About the Author
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) is the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed young adult novels. She has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, including graduate degrees from Cambridge University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and Yale University, where she received her Ph.D. in 2012. Jen wrote her first published novel when she was nineteen-years-old and sold her first five books while still in college. In additional to writing YA novels, Jen has also written original pilot scripts for television networks like USA and MTV, and she is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of fandom and the cognitive science of fiction and the imagination more broadly. Jen is an Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds a dual appointment in Psychology and Professional Writing.
Author Links:
- Website: https://www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jenlynnbarnes
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorjenlynnbarnes/
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/164187
Review (no spoilers)
If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.
When I saw that TBR Beyond Tours was doing a tour for this book, I basically screeched in excitement. I still remember when I first read The Inheritance Games and how I thought it was an absolute masterpiece of a YA mystery. Books that have a multitude of puzzles and riddles to solve are definitely amongst some of my favorite, and The Inheritance Games Trilogy is full of them.
This brings me to my main complaint about this book: if this series is a trilogy, why the heck do we have a book #4? It actually took me a long time to figure out exactly when this book took place. Now that I’ve finished it, I can more accurately tell you that its timeline overlaps with that of book #3. In fact, it seems to take place somewhere in the time jump prior to the epilogue of The Final Gambit.
If I’m being honest, I don’t think this book was necessary at all. In fact, I kind of feel like I want to pretend the trilogy was its own thing and that this is some random fan fiction that someone decided to write. The fact that this book also ends in a way that suggests more installments irks me even more, because if there are more then stop referring to this as a trilogy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a cash grab that comes from the series performing well, but it would be disappointing if that were true.
That being said, I love Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ writing style, and the plot of this book (which follows both Grayson and Jameson doing their own mini-missions) was a lot of fun. I admit that I much preferred Grayson”s storyline to Jameson’s because it felt like it had more agency and motivation that I could get behind. Grayson wants to protect his family, and is willing to do anything in order to do that. Jameson’s plot, on the other hand, was mostly driven by Jameson’s boredom and unwillingness to lose—a trait that kind of actually annoys me about his character.
If you were a fan of The Inheritance Games “trilogy”, then this novel is a good way to reintroduce yourself into that world without having to worry too much about your beloved characters (especially given that it actually takes place before the epilogue of the last book). It was definitely a lot of fun, but I really don’t think it was necessary.
If you are planning on reading this one, I would recommend refreshing yourself on what happened in the previous books to avoid unnecessary confusion about all of the characters and their relationships to each other.
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