Hey everyone!
I hope everyone's doing okay. I'll mainly be doing only Book Tours this month because I have exams and some other stuff that I'm working on in the back. I'll be disclosing that soon enough when I get over with my exams, but until then you can always catch up with me on my Instagram- @aamna_iswriting, for further exclusive bookish content or if you just wanna chat with me.
But without further ado, let's move on to the post for today, that is, about Hawthorne Legacy, the sequel to the very fantastic YA mystery, The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes.
So if you don't know, I absolutely loved The Inheritance Games. It was a crazy, entertaining, and fun ride from the very first page, even if a little over-the-top. I was delighted when I got approved for an ARC, and as I had anticipated, the sequel was an even crazier, more entertaining and even more over-the-top journey.
So scroll down to know the Top 5 Reasons to Read This Book (or pick up this series, if you haven't read the first book)...
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Genre: Young Adult Mystery
Publishing date: September 7th, 2021
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Synopsis:
Intrigue, riches, and romance abound in this thrilling sequel to the New York Times bestselling The Inheritance Games perfect for fans of Karen McManus and Holly Jackson. The Inheritance Games ended with a bombshell, and now heiress Avery Grambs has to pick up the pieces and find the man who might hold the answers to all of her questions – including why Tobias Hawthorne left his entire fortune to Avery, a virtual stranger, rather than to his own daughters or grandsons. Thanks to a DNA test, Avery knows that she’s not a Hawthorne by blood, but clues pile up hinting at a deeper connection to the family than she had ever imagined. As the mystery grows and the plot thickens, Grayson and Jameson, the enigmatic and magnetic Hawthorne grandsons, continue to pull Avery in different directions. And there are threats lurking around every corner, as adversaries emerge who will stop at nothing to see Avery out of the picture – by any means necessary. With nonstop action, aspirational jet-setting, family intrigue, swoon-worthy romance, and billions of dollars hanging in the balance, The Hawthorne Legacy will thrill Jennifer Lynn Barnes fans and new readers alike.
TOP 5 REASONS TO READ THIS BOOK
1) One of my most favorite elements of the story was the setting itself. In the first book, the story is a lot more contained and the events mainly take place in or around the Hawthorne Manor; but by the second book, we see a lot more places. Despite that, the Hawthorne Manor was a truly fascinating setting, with its exuberant hallways and hidden rooms, and secrets as alive as its residents.
It's a place full of so lavish and beautiful when the author describes it, with hidden messages on paintings, full of hidden patterns and puzzles rife with the personality of its designer, the elusive Tobias Hawthorne.
If you enjoy these kinds of settings, you'll love the vibe of this book.
2) If you love family drama, long-buried secrets, conspiracies, backstabbing, and betrayals, this book is perfect for that. The story follows the Hawthorne family post the death of their sort-of patriarch and his very controversial and confounding will, in which he leaves all of his multi-millionaire fortunes to a teenage girl named Avery, and the deal that she has to live in that Manor for a whole year before she can take full ownership of that money.
The Hawthorne family is big, with three daughters and their sons, Xander, Grey, James, and Nate, all of whom don't know who or where their fathers are and have been raised together by their grandfather. There are tons of plot twists and revelations one after the other that will make your head spin (sometimes not in a good way), but it will always keep you hooked.
3) There are quite some interesting character dynamics and relationships that are explored here, and I had a fun time with them. One of the most noteworthy is obviously the relationship between the Hawthorne brothers. They're intensely loyal to one another. They have their own strange language and code words and understand each other. They're always there for each other, but also have this electrifying antagonism, or maybe that's not the right word- mischievous, maybe?- a vibe that pops of the page. I don't really have the words to describe it, but it's very intriguing.
4) Everything about this is whatever The Inheritance Games had, but 10x leveled up. It's got way more action, with guns firing and bombs exploding. The heat and the angst and the romance are on high flare, and there was not a single boring second of it.
If you know me, you know that I love the soft character moments just as much as the action, so I really appreciated when the author showed us the quiet moments as well. One complaint I had with the first book was that even with so much chaos happening with the protagonist, Avery, we did not see any sort of mental toll that it took on her, but it was remedied in this book. A whole lot of terrible things go down, and I loved seeing Avery clearly deal with it. We see her weak, and then we see her grow stronger.
5) It was a well-done and satisfying conclusion. Even though I was not the most pleased with the unnecessarily bumpy route it took, I loved the way it ended. What I mean to say is, a lot of the time the story got very overwhelming and overly complicated, misleading us with shocking revelations, and then there would be another twist that would prove the earlier information wrong, and that would just overturn and really confuse the thought process in our head.
I know that sounds too negative, but I think that was just a personal preference. The last 10 or 8 chapters were so much fun, and when I realized where the book was headed, I could not stop flipping the pages. I was pretty glad, mostly because I just like being right and the couple I shipped finally sailed off in the most perfect way.
This book is the complete opposite of a cozy mystery, so if you're into car chases and rich millionaire families and secret passageways, this will be entirely your cup of tea.
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About the Author
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been, in turn, a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She’s been writing for as long as she can remember, finished her first full book (which she now refers to as a “practice book” and which none of you will ever see) when she was still in high school, and then wrote Golden the summer after her freshman year in college, when she was nineteen.
Jen graduated high school in 2002, and from Yale University with a degree in cognitive science (the study of the brain and thought) in May of 2006. She’ll be spending the 2006-2007 school year abroad, doing autism research at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.