this thing for everyone who asked (0)

For this summer, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg. Here’s why I strongly disliked my choice.

Let’s look at the protagonist, Avery. She feels like a generic character that’s only important because the plot made her inherent billions. She doesn’t really do anything with her money, even though she was, at one point in the book, thinking about all the good she could do with her newfound fortune. It’s a really underdeveloped idea and was only really brought up in that one scene. She had an entire law office to herself, so if she really wanted to, she could have consulted her lawyers about stuff she could do that would help around the local community or something. She doesn’t, and while it seems boring on paper, there could be something about, say, a sudden influx of murders and robberies, and she could make vigilante robots to take the evildoers down or something to that effect. The fact that Avery doesn’t even do something with her money makes it seem like she’s a screwdriver; she only actually needs to be there in the most specific scenarios that only ever happen in this book. In some parts of the book, there were parts where I thought that I was supposed to project myself onto Avery, but what’s happening to her is such an out-there situation that I find it really hard to relate. In terms of character development, she doesn’t really learn anything from the start of the book to the end. Really, I was curious as to how she would grow as a person from this experience from the beginning, and the answer to that question was that she wouldn’t. Something I strongly disliked about the book was that the first solution that came to Avery’s head was always the correct one, which detracts from the book as a whole because if every one of her guesses is the right one, how can she grow from making mistakes? Honestly the way Avery was written set her character up to fail. Also, in the first half of the house, she occasionally gives advice on chess. Disregard all of it. As someone who competitively plays chess every once in a while and even has an official rating with the USCF (albeit it’s in the 500s, which isn’t too good), all of the advice is complete gibberish. To summarize about our protagonist, she doesn’t feel like a person, more like a plot device that gives bad chess advice.

So if you couldn’t already tell, I dislike the main character and how she was written, so what about the antagonist? Avery’s sister named Libby’s abusive boyfriend named Drake acts as the antagonist for this book. He’s a terrible person, he’s a physical abuser and tried to kill Avery twice, but really, he’s not that interesting. The only thing different setting him apart from comic books from the 50s or 60s is the realism of what he does. While those villains were out there doing dumb things to dominate the world, he was doing things real abusers do. But in the end, both the comic book villains and Drake seem to only do what they do for 1 reason and 1 reason only; they can. There was never a point in the book where even the slightest hint of a motive was revealed. Similarly to Avery, he never grew as a character throughout the book and the only resolution we got from him is that he was sent to prison, which, given everything we’ve seen him do, is the most realistic outcome, but certainly not the most satisfying. Honestly, Grayson, one of Tobias Hawthornes’ grandsons, would have made a better villain. Tobias is the billionaire who left everything to Avery. Grayson’s entire family, who he loves dearly, was just disinherited to this seemingly random girl who, without any further context, seemed to have somehow manipulated his old, decaying grandpa. He was left with nothing by his own grandfather, and he will do anything to reclaim his family’s name from the girl behind the world’s largest exploitation of the vulnerable. I would love to see a version of the book where Libby is single and the main antagonist is Grayson. Just ditch Drake, he’s pretty much there to enhance the drama. But later on, it’s revealed that Skye Laughlin, the Hawthorne grandsons’ mother, helped Drake in his first attempt at Avery’s life. I mean, there was technically a hint to this, the hint being when she cheekily said that she made it her duty to befriend everyone who disinherits her family, but when she says that in that point of the book, there is no former direction for the reader to know what to make of it. Something as subtle as a mention of the pronunciation “dr” coming from a room Avery walked by would be cool, but instead, it seems as if the author thought that something unexpected happening with no proper build up beforehand would make a good twist. If I were the author, I would make the gunman Rachael, a cousin of the Hawthorne grandsons, because she was the one with the most proper buildup for the reveal moment due to her lack of alibi and she’s the child of Zara and Constantine, two people who are also apart of the Hawthorne family and strongly despise Rachael due to obvious reasons. Zara and Constantine could have somehow talked her into opening fire like some sort of necessary evil thing. Nobody would have wanted to do it, but to them, they would have to in order to reclaim the Hawthorne name. To summarize, the antagonists are either one-dimensional, not used to their full potential, or have the oddest reveals in the history of literature.

Alright. The characters don’t seem to be very well written. Surely the conflict will step up in quality, right? Well, to tell you the truth, the conflict was the second hardest thing to write about in this essay. Not because it’s a really powerful aspect of the book and I can’t say it in words without disrespecting it or something, but because of the difficulty of finding the conflict. Perhaps the closest to conflict I have is Drake versus Avery and Libby. To be honest, it was a snooze fest of a conflict. The amount of times Drake is brought up because of something he did is less than 10 times. He has done exactly 6 malicious deeds, which are being an abusive boyfriend 3 times over, defamation of Avery, shooting up Avery and Jameson, and attempting to kill Avery, Alisa who’s one of Avery’s lawyers, and Oren who’s Avery’s main bodyguard. Compare this to any other villain you know, like Voldemort. Think about everything he’s done that gave him the title of he-who-shall-not-be-named. And then we have Drake, who’s most certainly the poster boy of realistic and boring villains. This is a book where a billionaire leaves everything to a random teenager whom he had a singular conversation with, and that conversation was 2 sentences long. And that billionaire hosted a whole scavenger hunt to explain everything about that decision. I’m not here for realism. I’m here for excitement, adventure, anything except realism. And yet the author completely ditches the entire nature of her book to a villain that brings up the least interesting, most forced-into-your-throat conflicts I have ever seen. These conflicts are the melatonin of conflicts. There is practically nothing in the precise 6 times he did anything wrong that does anything but enhance the drama. There is no reason for these conflicts to be in the book if they don’t have a larger meaning to them, such as increasing the frequency and intensity of his deeds and, this might be kind of far-fetched, but just maybe he should have any reason at all to do what he does give this book a memorable villain that will stick with the reader for ages. To summarize, the conflict in this book is the boring part, and while it may not be intentional, it makes me want to go to sleep.

I’m starting to think this may not be a very good book, but surely there’s some sort of overarching theme about the story, right? Well, do you remember how I said that the conflict was only the 2nd hardest part of the book to write about? This part was the hardest for the same reason the conflict was hard to write about. The main difference is that the conflict was possible to be found in a week when reading the book blind with no outside help. That’s right, it took me a full week to find anything resembling a theme. Do you want to hear the one theme I spent an entire 7 days trying to figure out? It’s letting go. Throughout the portion of the book where we know the day and month when Emily, another cousin of the Hawthornes, died, we’re reminded about something Avery’s mom said before her death. She said that she had a secret about Avery’s date of birth. Avery was born on the same day and month Emily died. Throughout that entire part, the reader is led to believe that Avery’s mom somehow knew Tobias Hawthorne and that the connection between Avery’s birth and Emily’s death wasn’t a coincidence. However, when we get to the end of the book, Avery and the grandsons open a box with 5 letters, one for each person. There are no more clues to something greater that the gang is left with, and what they were given was the end of the line. At this point, both the reader and Avery are led to believe that it really was just a coincidence, that what her mom was thinking of was completely different and that Tobias selected Avery because she was a random girl that had a coincidental yet ominously reminiscent birthday that had a funny little name, as Avery’s full name is Avery Kylie Grambs, an anagram for A Very Risky Gamble. What Tobias left her was a packet of sugar which is probably no longer FDA approved because one time, Avery was stacking sugar packets at a diner and her mom used her full name when talking to her about it. Tobias was, for whatever reason, in the room when this was happening and asked Avery if she could spell her full name. She did. Coming back to the present, there seems to be no other way Tobias could have known Avery, so the only possible conclusion is that he used Avery as a tool to bring the grandsons together for one final puzzle. There was nothing her mother had to do with the Hawthorne story and there’s something else she was talking about. Additionally, the fact that there were seemingly no more clues to be found proves that the one time at the diner was the reason why Avery was selected and that was simply the truth, albeit a hard one. At the end of the day, she couldn’t hold on to something her mom said years ago or a game that was already completed and she just had to forget about both. That’s right, it took me a week to come up with a glorified logical fallacy that had to have been the theme of the book because nothing else was filling the seat in. I have searched this book far and wide and there cannot be another thing adjacent to a theme. I say that what has to be the theme of the book is a logical fallacy because even though what Avery’s mom was talking about had nothing to do with the Hawthornes, she was still talking about a secret that hasn’t been discovered yet. And with Avery’s newfound resources, surely she could have sent a lawyer to research what happened on the day she was born? If she cared that much, she should have acted on it. And how does she know there weren’t any other hints in what Tobias gave the Hawthorne grandsons? There is no reason for her to have simply forgotten about it the way she did, and it infuriates me to no end, similarly to anything about this book in general. To summarize, the theme is letting go, even if it was portrayed in such an odd way that detracts from the theme.

Alright. I don’t know what to say about this book anymore. What about the narrator’s point of view? The book is written in first person and it never switches characters. That’s okay, but sometimes in this book I feel like it should switch over to Libby or one of the grandsons. Avery’s narration gets pretty boring, but in this book, being bored is like brushing your teeth, it’s normal. To be honest, the reason why I’m saying that the POV is the best part of the book is because it’s not infuriating on any extreme, just uninteresting. There’s nothing special to note about it because it’s not special in any way. It’s just inoffensive. And it is for this reason that this paragraph is by far the shortest paragraph in this essay. To summarize, the narrator’s POV isn’t interesting and is pretty bland.

Alright, we are now down to the last part of this essay, the setting of the book. This is also the longest part of the essay due to a number of reasons. The setting at the beginning of the book is Avery’s high school. The book starts off with Avery solving a test that was deliberately made impossible by the teacher that assigned it. But here’s the thing: that test was never brought up again. So why exactly was it in the book? I don’t know. There’s so much buildup around the test in the first part of the book only for it to be diminished immediately. Also, if it was made to be impossible, why exactly is it that she was able to get a 100% on it just by studying? And if this is the case, how come nobody got a 100% on the test before? How was this allowed? Are these tests graded? If so, how are people supposed to get a 100 for the class? So many kids could have gotten a GPA of 4.0 to get into the greatest colleges in the world but can’t because this teacher just didn’t think things through. Now, this paragraph is already longer than the previous one by a few lines and we’re not even a tenth through it yet, so I would like to move through my frustration at that teacher right now. Moving on, we now have Hawthorne House. It’s a huge house that, according to Jameson who’s one of the grandons, regularly has a construction crew in it that he never encounters without trying to evade them. At the end of the book, there are these objects that have a poem scribbled onto them. You were supposed to read the poem and try to follow its instructions to get to the next step in the game. These were found in locations where there were 10 and 18 of something because Emily died on 10/18. These, however, were only found at the end of the book. You didn’t have to do anything to actually access these parts of the house where there were 10 and 18 of something. You could literally skip pretty much the entire game if you were to just find one of the objects, because please keep in mind that you only need 1 in order to progress. What was the point of the game if Tobias made it that easy to just skip all of it? Wait, actually, speaking of humongous skips in the puzzle, let me do myself one better. What if I told you that Avery and the grandsons could literally have just gone straight to the 2nd to last part of the puzzle in a way that’s perfectly reasonable? At the very end of the book, the last part of the game involves a secret basement that nobody knew about until they got this far into the game. But the floorboard covering the staircase was loose and was in the one part of the house everyone was at for the reading of the will. So surely someone could have just accidentally stepped on the loose floorboard and the grandsons could have just pried open the board in order to just get right to the end? They all knew their grandfather and loose floorboards were used in puzzles in the game before, so surely it's perfectly reasonable to assume that this is no exception, right? While this skip is a bit more of a stretch than the last one since it does rely on unknown and incalculable probabilities, why did Tobias go through all this effort to make this whole thing when they literally could have gone straight to the end without even meaning to? If they stepped on the floorboard, this book could have been 50 pages long at maximum. If they didn’t but went for the more obvious strategy of accidentally stumbling upon an object, then the book could have been 60 pages long at maximum. But in the parts of the game that could have been shaved off, there are things that just don’t make sense in any way, shape, or form. The first thing that’s nonsensical is that there’s an entire wing of the house that’s just locked off. There is no reason for it to be locked off, as its purpose was to be the play area for the grandsons when they were younger. What kind of health and safety hazard was within it? They explore it a bit and find that there is none, but there is the next clue in a desk that was sealed off from the rest of the house for whatever reason. Speaking of, when Avery asked Oren about Davenports, a type of desk, within Hawthorne House, he started taking her to libraries in the house. Now, surely there are other rooms in the house that have desks, right? Offices, bedrooms, maybe attics and basements, and that’s only off the top of my head. How did Oren know that the Davenport was in a library? In fact, how did he know that it wasn’t in the law offices that Avery’s lawyers work at? And the next and last thing that doesn’t make sense is that there’s a distinct lack of direction everywhere you go in this house. There’s a part about the first puzzle of the game that’s coming up in a page or so. Also, where exactly do the characters go to find the Davenport? And where do they go in the West Brook? Is there even anything to see in the Black Woods? Those were things I just had to vent about for a bit, back to our regularly scheduled program. If the grandsons didn’t go for the huge skips that go straight for the end of the book, they could have made a number of skips throughout that would still have cut down on the number of pages this book would’ve had. For example, when the first 2 or 3 numbers that would be necessary for the passcode were revealed, or maybe even 1 of one of the grandsons were smart enough, they could have just remembered about the day Emily died. In fact, I deem it impressive that they didn’t. Given how large an impact that moment made on their lives and how heavily those numbers were pushed onto them throughout it, they should instantly be able to recognize what the numbers mean, cutting down at least 50 pages from the book, making the total amount of pages in the book anywhere between 322 and 122, depending on what and which numbers they skipped. Also, in the beginning of the game, the very first puzzle is to search for a book that doesn’t match its cover. Before we cover the actual skip, we need to discuss just how poorly designed this part was assuming there wasn’t anything the group didn’t skip by accident. Hawthorne House has five libraries in total, each of them hosting a lot of books. Given how Avery, Jameson, and sometimes Grayson all spent hours at a time on multiple sessions searching for the one book, it can be assumed that there are probably over 1,000 books in the house, possibly 1,000 per library if we had known some unknown and incalculable variables such as the rate of how quickly everyone checked the books, exactly how long each session was, etc. etc. There is no further guidance on what to find other than a book that doesn’t match its cover. It is entirely possible that everyone could have spent a minimum of a month searching for the one book and still not know where it is. Have you ever searched for something for so long that you eventually forget what you were looking for? The only two people who were even playing the game at the start were Avery and Jameson. It would take a week at least with all 4 of the grandsons and Avery playing, so imagine just how long it could potentially take with only Avery, Jameson, and occasionally Grayson. I would imagine that if we maintained the work team that the book put together, which you should know at this point, and we made the correct book the very last book they picked, it would add… Actually, if I’m being perfectly honest, I think that it would only really add half a page at absolute maximum. I bet that every author with at least 1 published book in the world, regardless of how good or bad, can understand how boring just reading about a few people pulling out books and putting that back in for an extended amount of time can be. Now, onto how many pages having the perfect luck for this part would skip. If I’m being honest, I think it would skip out on 5-7 pages because they genuinely work at it for about that long. Honestly, I wish the author just put Avery and Jameson to work and just instantly cut to the part where they find a book. There’s nothing that important in the part where they just pull out book after book, so we can just do away with all of it. And for the last skip that comes to mind, it’s actually at the 2nd to last part that the group could have cut to by prying the floorboard early. Xavier can skip the 2nd to last part. When the group finally discovers the basement, it was only Avery and Xavier who actually found it. At the end of the basement, there is a puzzle that requires the handprints of the 4 Hawthorne grandsons. Now, earlier in the book, Xavier is found missing an eyebrow because a robot that he made exploded into his face. I mention this because this verifies that Xavier has a good understanding of how technology like handprints works. So Xavier could have skipped having to get the other 3 grandsons together, especially considering that Jameson stormed out of the puzzle when it was revealed that the game revolved around the date 10/18, just by getting whatever he uses to program robots to reconfigure the handprints into being flagged as having been pressed. This would have saved 3-5 pages of the book. To summarize the potential time saves in this book, here’s a table showing how many pages that we could have had if the characters found skips and what skips they found.

Skips used                                                     | Pages in the hypothetical book

The skip that goes straight to the basement |45-47 max.

and the 2nd to last puzzle skip                      |                                                ㅤ

                                                                      |

Only the skip that goes straight to the           |50 max.

basement                                                      |                                                 ㅤ

                                                                     |

The skip that uses the objects’ poor hiding  |55-57 max.

spots and the 2nd to last puzzle skip           |                                                 ㅤ

                                                                     |

Only the skip that uses the objects              |60 max.                                     ㅤ

                                                                    |

The skip where a Hawthorne recognizes    |117-319

the date early on and the 2nd to last puzzle|

skip                                                             |                                                    ㅤ

                                                                    |

The above and perfect book luck               |110-314                                      ㅤ

                                                                   |

Only the skip where a Hawthorne              |122-322

recognizes the date early on                      |                                                    ㅤ

                                                                  |

The above and perfect book luck              |115-317                                        ㅤ

Now, you might be wondering why I even bothered looking at time saves in this essay when it seems so outrageously out of place that you could mistake it for a guide on speedrunning a video game. You see, there’s a reason why these skips are in this book, and it’s for one reason and one reason only. The setting and the story behind it was simply poorly designed. Imagine if the real life golden owl hunt was this easy to solve. The guy who made the whole puzzle had to think of witty clues that are difficult but reasonable to solve, he had to actually select a location, he had to do so much for this singular statue of an owl. Now imagine if a bunch of teens skipped the whole game because they saw a gold glitter that was bright enough that it could blind people if they looked straight at it in the dirt. That’s pretty much how this book is, except the teens don’t notice the gold glitter until they see a bunch of people with their copies of “On the Trail of the Golden Owl” pointing at it and then suddenly they see it and somehow muscle everyone away for the treasure to be theirs. This is just a badly designed game set up by a badly designed setting. Everything would have been so much better if the clues were better hidden and if the kids had a better sense of what they were doing, which is also a fault of the setting because everything in the setting was set up by Tobias, who didn’t give them enough to reasonably win the game. Authors should remember that settings are the most important parts of the book. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the setting, such as it containing obvious clues that no person would miss even if they were blind and deaf that the characters somehow just don’t quite catch onto, then that flaw leaks into the rest of the book, ruining the immersive experience in ways that are just impossible to comprehend until you read the book for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll have characters who simultaneously think that the sun isn’t as big as it is because there’s dark in space and solve a Rubik’s cube with their hands tied behind their back while underwater while playing themselves into a winning position against a chess grandmaster while watching Rick and Morty on top of all of that. It’s actually crazy how much a good setting is necessary for a good book and how badly a poorly-done setting can negatively affect the overall experience someone can get by reading the book. A good example of the former, a good setting, is Harry Potter. The series didn’t take place in a normal campus or a regular old castle, no, it took place in a magic castle which was, in a sense, a character in of itself. Imagine how different the book would be if the staircases didn’t move all over the place or if there wasn’t a hut with a man named Hagrid who could probably be a pro wrestler but instead decided to teach children about magic stuff residing in it on campus. Now of course, fantasy is very different from mystery, so how about we get another good setting from the mystery genre? Now, what if I told you that the board game Clue had a better setting than the book? Clue takes place in a mansion and your goal is to find out which character killed an unnamed victim. The mansion has nine rooms the players explore, and each room is perfectly reasonable for a mansion to have. They are, in order, a kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, a hall, a study, a library, a billiard room, a conservatory, a ballroom, and an inaccessible cellar that contains the answers to the murder. When a player moves to the room, they have to make a suggestion as to who did the crime, where they did it, and what weapon they used. The tokens containing everything the person mentioned are moved into the room. If the player calls out something the player to their left has in their hand in the form of cards, the player to the left shows one of the called-out things to the turn player. Also, other players have to disprove the suggestion if they can. This makes it so as the game progresses, the players find out more and more about the murder and there are no inconsistencies in what a person knows or should know, and you don’t have someone suddenly noticing something that should have been noticed way before, such as the objects scattered around Hawthorne House that were only noticed way into the game when they were sitting in plain sight in pretty much every room of the house. Now, why is it that the setting of Clue, a board game that’s not supposed to have such a good setting, is so much better than the setting of something that’s supposed to have a really nice setting? It’s because of how much information each setting gives off. You should know the abundance of info Hawthorne House gives early that allows the players to skip straight to the end of the book if they were attentive enough, while the setting in Clue doesn’t allow for any form of progression skips, making it much more immersive than the book, which is supposed to be super immersive. And to finally finish off the final part of this essay, I shall now explain one last reason why the setting in The Inheritance Games isn’t a good setting. It’s because of the sheer overcomplexity  and anti-sensibility of everything. This house has rooms upon rooms and none of them are necessary in the slightest. I would assume that the purpose of a solarium, a room with a glass dome, would be to have plants grow indoors, no? Well, the solarium in Hawthorne House just has the room for no apparent reason. It’s literally just there. Avery didn’t know what a solarium was before visiting, and there were no plants in it. If you wanted to sunbathe, you could just go outside and do it. Another weird room is the movie theater. Surely this house that has a room per starving person Tobias could have fed if he was willing to give back to his community has 1 or more living room(s)? Why don’t they just watch TV in those places because a house this size should have more than 1 living room instead of making everyone go on a thousand-year odyssey just to see Morbius? Also, do you remember the basement from the skips? How was that allowed? There’s no way that anything about it was OSHA-approved. A staircase that makes you go down two stairs at a time that also has no railings? There are amazingly large mortality risks from that. A huge basement with only 1 exit? If a fire starts down there, well, let’s hope they were all near the exit. And there is absolutely no way that they would let a basement with no form of constant restoration slide. If the ceiling breaks, half the house is going to just slide off. And the reason why I bring up these logic and OSHA violations is that this book takes place in the real world. The author is writing human characters that have human needs and laws they have to follow. And these rooms break everything in terms of both convenience and law. The book takes place in Texas, but if OSHA lets that cellar slide, then it might as well take place in Narnia. Now, just because books take place in the real world doesn’t mean that the characters have to follow the laws. But this is a building that was legally required to be approved by OSHA before being built. So how and why, may I ask, does it exist? That’s not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know. To summarize the section that takes up about half of the essay, the setting, there are skips the characters could have done to turn this 372-page novel into a 45-page novella, the setting was set up to make the characters look as if they aren’t the brightest bulb on the chandelier, and nothing about the setting makes logical or legal sense.

 To summarize this essay, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg.

END OF FORUM

For this summer, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg. Here’s why I strongly disliked my choice.

Let’s look at the protagonist, Avery. She feels like a generic character that’s only important because the plot made her inherent billions. She doesn’t really do anything with her money, even though she was, at one point in the book, thinking about all the good she could do with her newfound fortune. It’s a really underdeveloped idea and was only really brought up in that one scene. She had an entire law office to herself, so if she really wanted to, she could have consulted her lawyers about stuff she could do that would help around the local community or something. She doesn’t, and while it seems boring on paper, there could be something about, say, a sudden influx of murders and robberies, and she could make vigilante robots to take the evildoers down or something to that effect. The fact that Avery doesn’t even do something with her money makes it seem like she’s a screwdriver; she only actually needs to be there in the most specific scenarios that only ever happen in this book. In some parts of the book, there were parts where I thought that I was supposed to project myself onto Avery, but what’s happening to her is such an out-there situation that I find it really hard to relate. In terms of character development, she doesn’t really learn anything from the start of the book to the end. Really, I was curious as to how she would grow as a person from this experience from the beginning, and the answer to that question was that she wouldn’t. Something I strongly disliked about the book was that the first solution that came to Avery’s head was always the correct one, which detracts from the book as a whole because if every one of her guesses is the right one, how can she grow from making mistakes? Honestly the way Avery was written set her character up to fail. Also, in the first half of the house, she occasionally gives advice on chess. Disregard all of it. As someone who competitively plays chess every once in a while and even has an official rating with the USCF (albeit it’s in the 500s, which isn’t too good), all of the advice is complete gibberish. To summarize about our protagonist, she doesn’t feel like a person, more like a plot device that gives bad chess advice.

So if you couldn’t already tell, I dislike the main character and how she was written, so what about the antagonist? Avery’s sister named Libby’s abusive boyfriend named Drake acts as the antagonist for this book. He’s a terrible person, he’s a physical abuser and tried to kill Avery twice, but really, he’s not that interesting. The only thing different setting him apart from comic books from the 50s or 60s is the realism of what he does. While those villains were out there doing dumb things to dominate the world, he was doing things real abusers do. But in the end, both the comic book villains and Drake seem to only do what they do for 1 reason and 1 reason only; they can. There was never a point in the book where even the slightest hint of a motive was revealed. Similarly to Avery, he never grew as a character throughout the book and the only resolution we got from him is that he was sent to prison, which, given everything we’ve seen him do, is the most realistic outcome, but certainly not the most satisfying. Honestly, Grayson, one of Tobias Hawthornes’ grandsons, would have made a better villain. Tobias is the billionaire who left everything to Avery. Grayson’s entire family, who he loves dearly, was just disinherited to this seemingly random girl who, without any further context, seemed to have somehow manipulated his old, decaying grandpa. He was left with nothing by his own grandfather, and he will do anything to reclaim his family’s name from the girl behind the world’s largest exploitation of the vulnerable. I would love to see a version of the book where Libby is single and the main antagonist is Grayson. Just ditch Drake, he’s pretty much there to enhance the drama. But later on, it’s revealed that Skye Laughlin, the Hawthorne grandsons’ mother, helped Drake in his first attempt at Avery’s life. I mean, there was technically a hint to this, the hint being when she cheekily said that she made it her duty to befriend everyone who disinherits her family, but when she says that in that point of the book, there is no former direction for the reader to know what to make of it. Something as subtle as a mention of the pronunciation “dr” coming from a room Avery walked by would be cool, but instead, it seems as if the author thought that something unexpected happening with no proper build up beforehand would make a good twist. If I were the author, I would make the gunman Rachael, a cousin of the Hawthorne grandsons, because she was the one with the most proper buildup for the reveal moment due to her lack of alibi and she’s the child of Zara and Constantine, two people who are also apart of the Hawthorne family and strongly despise Rachael due to obvious reasons. Zara and Constantine could have somehow talked her into opening fire like some sort of necessary evil thing. Nobody would have wanted to do it, but to them, they would have to in order to reclaim the Hawthorne name. To summarize, the antagonists are either one-dimensional, not used to their full potential, or have the oddest reveals in the history of literature.

Alright. The characters don’t seem to be very well written. Surely the conflict will step up in quality, right? Well, to tell you the truth, the conflict was the second hardest thing to write about in this essay. Not because it’s a really powerful aspect of the book and I can’t say it in words without disrespecting it or something, but because of the difficulty of finding the conflict. Perhaps the closest to conflict I have is Drake versus Avery and Libby. To be honest, it was a snooze fest of a conflict. The amount of times Drake is brought up because of something he did is less than 10 times. He has done exactly 6 malicious deeds, which are being an abusive boyfriend 3 times over, defamation of Avery, shooting up Avery and Jameson, and attempting to kill Avery, Alisa who’s one of Avery’s lawyers, and Oren who’s Avery’s main bodyguard. Compare this to any other villain you know, like Voldemort. Think about everything he’s done that gave him the title of he-who-shall-not-be-named. And then we have Drake, who’s most certainly the poster boy of realistic and boring villains. This is a book where a billionaire leaves everything to a random teenager whom he had a singular conversation with, and that conversation was 2 sentences long. And that billionaire hosted a whole scavenger hunt to explain everything about that decision. I’m not here for realism. I’m here for excitement, adventure, anything except realism. And yet the author completely ditches the entire nature of her book to a villain that brings up the least interesting, most forced-into-your-throat conflicts I have ever seen. These conflicts are the melatonin of conflicts. There is practically nothing in the precise 6 times he did anything wrong that does anything but enhance the drama. There is no reason for these conflicts to be in the book if they don’t have a larger meaning to them, such as increasing the frequency and intensity of his deeds and, this might be kind of far-fetched, but just maybe he should have any reason at all to do what he does give this book a memorable villain that will stick with the reader for ages. To summarize, the conflict in this book is the boring part, and while it may not be intentional, it makes me want to go to sleep.

I’m starting to think this may not be a very good book, but surely there’s some sort of overarching theme about the story, right? Well, do you remember how I said that the conflict was only the 2nd hardest part of the book to write about? This part was the hardest for the same reason the conflict was hard to write about. The main difference is that the conflict was possible to be found in a week when reading the book blind with no outside help. That’s right, it took me a full week to find anything resembling a theme. Do you want to hear the one theme I spent an entire 7 days trying to figure out? It’s letting go. Throughout the portion of the book where we know the day and month when Emily, another cousin of the Hawthornes, died, we’re reminded about something Avery’s mom said before her death. She said that she had a secret about Avery’s date of birth. Avery was born on the same day and month Emily died. Throughout that entire part, the reader is led to believe that Avery’s mom somehow knew Tobias Hawthorne and that the connection between Avery’s birth and Emily’s death wasn’t a coincidence. However, when we get to the end of the book, Avery and the grandsons open a box with 5 letters, one for each person. There are no more clues to something greater that the gang is left with, and what they were given was the end of the line. At this point, both the reader and Avery are led to believe that it really was just a coincidence, that what her mom was thinking of was completely different and that Tobias selected Avery because she was a random girl that had a coincidental yet ominously reminiscent birthday that had a funny little name, as Avery’s full name is Avery Kylie Grambs, an anagram for A Very Risky Gamble. What Tobias left her was a packet of sugar which is probably no longer FDA approved because one time, Avery was stacking sugar packets at a diner and her mom used her full name when talking to her about it. Tobias was, for whatever reason, in the room when this was happening and asked Avery if she could spell her full name. She did. Coming back to the present, there seems to be no other way Tobias could have known Avery, so the only possible conclusion is that he used Avery as a tool to bring the grandsons together for one final puzzle. There was nothing her mother had to do with the Hawthorne story and there’s something else she was talking about. Additionally, the fact that there were seemingly no more clues to be found proves that the one time at the diner was the reason why Avery was selected and that was simply the truth, albeit a hard one. At the end of the day, she couldn’t hold on to something her mom said years ago or a game that was already completed and she just had to forget about both. That’s right, it took me a week to come up with a glorified logical fallacy that had to have been the theme of the book because nothing else was filling the seat in. I have searched this book far and wide and there cannot be another thing adjacent to a theme. I say that what has to be the theme of the book is a logical fallacy because even though what Avery’s mom was talking about had nothing to do with the Hawthornes, she was still talking about a secret that hasn’t been discovered yet. And with Avery’s newfound resources, surely she could have sent a lawyer to research what happened on the day she was born? If she cared that much, she should have acted on it. And how does she know there weren’t any other hints in what Tobias gave the Hawthorne grandsons? There is no reason for her to have simply forgotten about it the way she did, and it infuriates me to no end, similarly to anything about this book in general. To summarize, the theme is letting go, even if it was portrayed in such an odd way that detracts from the theme.

Alright. I don’t know what to say about this book anymore. What about the narrator’s point of view? The book is written in first person and it never switches characters. That’s okay, but sometimes in this book I feel like it should switch over to Libby or one of the grandsons. Avery’s narration gets pretty boring, but in this book, being bored is like brushing your teeth, it’s normal. To be honest, the reason why I’m saying that the POV is the best part of the book is because it’s not infuriating on any extreme, just uninteresting. There’s nothing special to note about it because it’s not special in any way. It’s just inoffensive. And it is for this reason that this paragraph is by far the shortest paragraph in this essay. To summarize, the narrator’s POV isn’t interesting and is pretty bland.

Alright, we are now down to the last part of this essay, the setting of the book. This is also the longest part of the essay due to a number of reasons. The setting at the beginning of the book is Avery’s high school. The book starts off with Avery solving a test that was deliberately made impossible by the teacher that assigned it. But here’s the thing: that test was never brought up again. So why exactly was it in the book? I don’t know. There’s so much buildup around the test in the first part of the book only for it to be diminished immediately. Also, if it was made to be impossible, why exactly is it that she was able to get a 100% on it just by studying? And if this is the case, how come nobody got a 100% on the test before? How was this allowed? Are these tests graded? If so, how are people supposed to get a 100 for the class? So many kids could have gotten a GPA of 4.0 to get into the greatest colleges in the world but can’t because this teacher just didn’t think things through. Now, this paragraph is already longer than the previous one by a few lines and we’re not even a tenth through it yet, so I would like to move through my frustration at that teacher right now. Moving on, we now have Hawthorne House. It’s a huge house that, according to Jameson who’s one of the grandons, regularly has a construction crew in it that he never encounters without trying to evade them. At the end of the book, there are these objects that have a poem scribbled onto them. You were supposed to read the poem and try to follow its instructions to get to the next step in the game. These were found in locations where there were 10 and 18 of something because Emily died on 10/18. These, however, were only found at the end of the book. You didn’t have to do anything to actually access these parts of the house where there were 10 and 18 of something. You could literally skip pretty much the entire game if you were to just find one of the objects, because please keep in mind that you only need 1 in order to progress. What was the point of the game if Tobias made it that easy to just skip all of it? Wait, actually, speaking of humongous skips in the puzzle, let me do myself one better. What if I told you that Avery and the grandsons could literally have just gone straight to the 2nd to last part of the puzzle in a way that’s perfectly reasonable? At the very end of the book, the last part of the game involves a secret basement that nobody knew about until they got this far into the game. But the floorboard covering the staircase was loose and was in the one part of the house everyone was at for the reading of the will. So surely someone could have just accidentally stepped on the loose floorboard and the grandsons could have just pried open the board in order to just get right to the end? They all knew their grandfather and loose floorboards were used in puzzles in the game before, so surely it's perfectly reasonable to assume that this is no exception, right? While this skip is a bit more of a stretch than the last one since it does rely on unknown and incalculable probabilities, why did Tobias go through all this effort to make this whole thing when they literally could have gone straight to the end without even meaning to? If they stepped on the floorboard, this book could have been 50 pages long at maximum. If they didn’t but went for the more obvious strategy of accidentally stumbling upon an object, then the book could have been 60 pages long at maximum. But in the parts of the game that could have been shaved off, there are things that just don’t make sense in any way, shape, or form. The first thing that’s nonsensical is that there’s an entire wing of the house that’s just locked off. There is no reason for it to be locked off, as its purpose was to be the play area for the grandsons when they were younger. What kind of health and safety hazard was within it? They explore it a bit and find that there is none, but there is the next clue in a desk that was sealed off from the rest of the house for whatever reason. Speaking of, when Avery asked Oren about Davenports, a type of desk, within Hawthorne House, he started taking her to libraries in the house. Now, surely there are other rooms in the house that have desks, right? Offices, bedrooms, maybe attics and basements, and that’s only off the top of my head. How did Oren know that the Davenport was in a library? In fact, how did he know that it wasn’t in the law offices that Avery’s lawyers work at? And the next and last thing that doesn’t make sense is that there’s a distinct lack of direction everywhere you go in this house. There’s a part about the first puzzle of the game that’s coming up in a page or so. Also, where exactly do the characters go to find the Davenport? And where do they go in the West Brook? Is there even anything to see in the Black Woods? Those were things I just had to vent about for a bit, back to our regularly scheduled program. If the grandsons didn’t go for the huge skips that go straight for the end of the book, they could have made a number of skips throughout that would still have cut down on the number of pages this book would’ve had. For example, when the first 2 or 3 numbers that would be necessary for the passcode were revealed, or maybe even 1 of one of the grandsons were smart enough, they could have just remembered about the day Emily died. In fact, I deem it impressive that they didn’t. Given how large an impact that moment made on their lives and how heavily those numbers were pushed onto them throughout it, they should instantly be able to recognize what the numbers mean, cutting down at least 50 pages from the book, making the total amount of pages in the book anywhere between 322 and 122, depending on what and which numbers they skipped. Also, in the beginning of the game, the very first puzzle is to search for a book that doesn’t match its cover. Before we cover the actual skip, we need to discuss just how poorly designed this part was assuming there wasn’t anything the group didn’t skip by accident. Hawthorne House has five libraries in total, each of them hosting a lot of books. Given how Avery, Jameson, and sometimes Grayson all spent hours at a time on multiple sessions searching for the one book, it can be assumed that there are probably over 1,000 books in the house, possibly 1,000 per library if we had known some unknown and incalculable variables such as the rate of how quickly everyone checked the books, exactly how long each session was, etc. etc. There is no further guidance on what to find other than a book that doesn’t match its cover. It is entirely possible that everyone could have spent a minimum of a month searching for the one book and still not know where it is. Have you ever searched for something for so long that you eventually forget what you were looking for? The only two people who were even playing the game at the start were Avery and Jameson. It would take a week at least with all 4 of the grandsons and Avery playing, so imagine just how long it could potentially take with only Avery, Jameson, and occasionally Grayson. I would imagine that if we maintained the work team that the book put together, which you should know at this point, and we made the correct book the very last book they picked, it would add… Actually, if I’m being perfectly honest, I think that it would only really add half a page at absolute maximum. I bet that every author with at least 1 published book in the world, regardless of how good or bad, can understand how boring just reading about a few people pulling out books and putting that back in for an extended amount of time can be. Now, onto how many pages having the perfect luck for this part would skip. If I’m being honest, I think it would skip out on 5-7 pages because they genuinely work at it for about that long. Honestly, I wish the author just put Avery and Jameson to work and just instantly cut to the part where they find a book. There’s nothing that important in the part where they just pull out book after book, so we can just do away with all of it. And for the last skip that comes to mind, it’s actually at the 2nd to last part that the group could have cut to by prying the floorboard early. Xavier can skip the 2nd to last part. When the group finally discovers the basement, it was only Avery and Xavier who actually found it. At the end of the basement, there is a puzzle that requires the handprints of the 4 Hawthorne grandsons. Now, earlier in the book, Xavier is found missing an eyebrow because a robot that he made exploded into his face. I mention this because this verifies that Xavier has a good understanding of how technology like handprints works. So Xavier could have skipped having to get the other 3 grandsons together, especially considering that Jameson stormed out of the puzzle when it was revealed that the game revolved around the date 10/18, just by getting whatever he uses to program robots to reconfigure the handprints into being flagged as having been pressed. This would have saved 3-5 pages of the book. To summarize the potential time saves in this book, here’s a table showing how many pages that we could have had if the characters found skips and what skips they found.


Skips used | Pages in the hypothetical book

The skip that goes straight to the basement |45-47 max.

and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that goes straight to the |50 max.

basement | ㅤ

|

The skip that uses the objects’ poor hiding |55-57 max.

spots and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that uses the objects |60 max. ㅤ

|

The skip where a Hawthorne recognizes |117-319

the date early on and the 2nd to last puzzle|

skip | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |110-314 ㅤ

|

Only the skip where a Hawthorne |122-322

recognizes the date early on | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |115-317 ㅤ


Now, you might be wondering why I even bothered looking at time saves in this essay when it seems so outrageously out of place that you could mistake it for a guide on speedrunning a video game. You see, there’s a reason why these skips are in this book, and it’s for one reason and one reason only. The setting and the story behind it was simply poorly designed. Imagine if the real life golden owl hunt was this easy to solve. The guy who made the whole puzzle had to think of witty clues that are difficult but reasonable to solve, he had to actually select a location, he had to do so much for this singular statue of an owl. Now imagine if a bunch of teens skipped the whole game because they saw a gold glitter that was bright enough that it could blind people if they looked straight at it in the dirt. That’s pretty much how this book is, except the teens don’t notice the gold glitter until they see a bunch of people with their copies of “On the Trail of the Golden Owl” pointing at it and then suddenly they see it and somehow muscle everyone away for the treasure to be theirs. This is just a badly designed game set up by a badly designed setting. Everything would have been so much better if the clues were better hidden and if the kids had a better sense of what they were doing, which is also a fault of the setting because everything in the setting was set up by Tobias, who didn’t give them enough to reasonably win the game. Authors should remember that settings are the most important parts of the book. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the setting, such as it containing obvious clues that no person would miss even if they were blind and deaf that the characters somehow just don’t quite catch onto, then that flaw leaks into the rest of the book, ruining the immersive experience in ways that are just impossible to comprehend until you read the book for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll have characters who simultaneously think that the sun isn’t as big as it is because there’s dark in space and solve a Rubik’s cube with their hands tied behind their back while underwater while playing themselves into a winning position against a chess grandmaster while watching Rick and Morty on top of all of that. It’s actually crazy how much a good setting is necessary for a good book and how badly a poorly-done setting can negatively affect the overall experience someone can get by reading the book. A good example of the former, a good setting, is Harry Potter. The series didn’t take place in a normal campus or a regular old castle, no, it took place in a magic castle which was, in a sense, a character in of itself. Imagine how different the book would be if the staircases didn’t move all over the place or if there wasn’t a hut with a man named Hagrid who could probably be a pro wrestler but instead decided to teach children about magic stuff residing in it on campus. Now of course, fantasy is very different from mystery, so how about we get another good setting from the mystery genre? Now, what if I told you that the board game Clue had a better setting than the book? Clue takes place in a mansion and your goal is to find out which character killed an unnamed victim. The mansion has nine rooms the players explore, and each room is perfectly reasonable for a mansion to have. They are, in order, a kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, a hall, a study, a library, a billiard room, a conservatory, a ballroom, and an inaccessible cellar that contains the answers to the murder. When a player moves to the room, they have to make a suggestion as to who did the crime, where they did it, and what weapon they used. The tokens containing everything the person mentioned are moved into the room. If the player calls out something the player to their left has in their hand in the form of cards, the player to the left shows one of the called-out things to the turn player. Also, other players have to disprove the suggestion if they can. This makes it so as the game progresses, the players find out more and more about the murder and there are no inconsistencies in what a person knows or should know, and you don’t have someone suddenly noticing something that should have been noticed way before, such as the objects scattered around Hawthorne House that were only noticed way into the game when they were sitting in plain sight in pretty much every room of the house. Now, why is it that the setting of Clue, a board game that’s not supposed to have such a good setting, is so much better than the setting of something that’s supposed to have a really nice setting? It’s because of how much information each setting gives off. You should know the abundance of info Hawthorne House gives early that allows the players to skip straight to the end of the book if they were attentive enough, while the setting in Clue doesn’t allow for any form of progression skips, making it much more immersive than the book, which is supposed to be super immersive. And to finally finish off the final part of this essay, I shall now explain one last reason why the setting in The Inheritance Games isn’t a good setting. It’s because of the sheer overcomplexity and anti-sensibility of everything. This house has rooms upon rooms and none of them are necessary in the slightest. I would assume that the purpose of a solarium, a room with a glass dome, would be to have plants grow indoors, no? Well, the solarium in Hawthorne House just has the room for no apparent reason. It’s literally just there. Avery didn’t know what a solarium was before visiting, and there were no plants in it. If you wanted to sunbathe, you could just go outside and do it. Another weird room is the movie theater. Surely this house that has a room per starving person Tobias could have fed if he was willing to give back to his community has 1 or more living room(s)? Why don’t they just watch TV in those places because a house this size should have more than 1 living room instead of making everyone go on a thousand-year odyssey just to see Morbius? Also, do you remember the basement from the skips? How was that allowed? There’s no way that anything about it was OSHA-approved. A staircase that makes you go down two stairs at a time that also has no railings? There are amazingly large mortality risks from that. A huge basement with only 1 exit? If a fire starts down there, well, let’s hope they were all near the exit. And there is absolutely no way that they would let a basement with no form of constant restoration slide. If the ceiling breaks, half the house is going to just slide off. And the reason why I bring up these logic and OSHA violations is that this book takes place in the real world. The author is writing human characters that have human needs and laws they have to follow. And these rooms break everything in terms of both convenience and law. The book takes place in Texas, but if OSHA lets that cellar slide, then it might as well take place in Narnia. Now, just because books take place in the real world doesn’t mean that the characters have to follow the laws. But this is a building that was legally required to be approved by OSHA before being built. So how and why, may I ask, does it exist? That’s not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know. To summarize the section that takes up about half of the essay, the setting, there are skips the characters could have done to turn this 372-page novel into a 45-page novella, the setting was set up to make the characters look as if they aren’t the brightest bulb on the chandelier, and nothing about the setting makes logical or legal sense.

To summarize this essay, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg.

For this summer, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg. Here’s why I strongly disliked my choice.

Let’s look at the protagonist, Avery. She feels like a generic character that’s only important because the plot made her inherent billions. She doesn’t really do anything with her money, even though she was, at one point in the book, thinking about all the good she could do with her newfound fortune. It’s a really underdeveloped idea and was only really brought up in that one scene. She had an entire law office to herself, so if she really wanted to, she could have consulted her lawyers about stuff she could do that would help around the local community or something. She doesn’t, and while it seems boring on paper, there could be something about, say, a sudden influx of murders and robberies, and she could make vigilante robots to take the evildoers down or something to that effect. The fact that Avery doesn’t even do something with her money makes it seem like she’s a screwdriver; she only actually needs to be there in the most specific scenarios that only ever happen in this book. In some parts of the book, there were parts where I thought that I was supposed to project myself onto Avery, but what’s happening to her is such an out-there situation that I find it really hard to relate. In terms of character development, she doesn’t really learn anything from the start of the book to the end. Really, I was curious as to how she would grow as a person from this experience from the beginning, and the answer to that question was that she wouldn’t. Something I strongly disliked about the book was that the first solution that came to Avery’s head was always the correct one, which detracts from the book as a whole because if every one of her guesses is the right one, how can she grow from making mistakes? Honestly the way Avery was written set her character up to fail. Also, in the first half of the house, she occasionally gives advice on chess. Disregard all of it. As someone who competitively plays chess every once in a while and even has an official rating with the USCF (albeit it’s in the 500s, which isn’t too good), all of the advice is complete gibberish. To summarize about our protagonist, she doesn’t feel like a person, more like a plot device that gives bad chess advice.

So if you couldn’t already tell, I dislike the main character and how she was written, so what about the antagonist? Avery’s sister named Libby’s abusive boyfriend named Drake acts as the antagonist for this book. He’s a terrible person, he’s a physical abuser and tried to kill Avery twice, but really, he’s not that interesting. The only thing different setting him apart from comic books from the 50s or 60s is the realism of what he does. While those villains were out there doing dumb things to dominate the world, he was doing things real abusers do. But in the end, both the comic book villains and Drake seem to only do what they do for 1 reason and 1 reason only; they can. There was never a point in the book where even the slightest hint of a motive was revealed. Similarly to Avery, he never grew as a character throughout the book and the only resolution we got from him is that he was sent to prison, which, given everything we’ve seen him do, is the most realistic outcome, but certainly not the most satisfying. Honestly, Grayson, one of Tobias Hawthornes’ grandsons, would have made a better villain. Tobias is the billionaire who left everything to Avery. Grayson’s entire family, who he loves dearly, was just disinherited to this seemingly random girl who, without any further context, seemed to have somehow manipulated his old, decaying grandpa. He was left with nothing by his own grandfather, and he will do anything to reclaim his family’s name from the girl behind the world’s largest exploitation of the vulnerable. I would love to see a version of the book where Libby is single and the main antagonist is Grayson. Just ditch Drake, he’s pretty much there to enhance the drama. But later on, it’s revealed that Skye Laughlin, the Hawthorne grandsons’ mother, helped Drake in his first attempt at Avery’s life. I mean, there was technically a hint to this, the hint being when she cheekily said that she made it her duty to befriend everyone who disinherits her family, but when she says that in that point of the book, there is no former direction for the reader to know what to make of it. Something as subtle as a mention of the pronunciation “dr” coming from a room Avery walked by would be cool, but instead, it seems as if the author thought that something unexpected happening with no proper build up beforehand would make a good twist. If I were the author, I would make the gunman Rachael, a cousin of the Hawthorne grandsons, because she was the one with the most proper buildup for the reveal moment due to her lack of alibi and she’s the child of Zara and Constantine, two people who are also apart of the Hawthorne family and strongly despise Rachael due to obvious reasons. Zara and Constantine could have somehow talked her into opening fire like some sort of necessary evil thing. Nobody would have wanted to do it, but to them, they would have to in order to reclaim the Hawthorne name. To summarize, the antagonists are either one-dimensional, not used to their full potential, or have the oddest reveals in the history of literature.

Alright. The characters don’t seem to be very well written. Surely the conflict will step up in quality, right? Well, to tell you the truth, the conflict was the second hardest thing to write about in this essay. Not because it’s a really powerful aspect of the book and I can’t say it in words without disrespecting it or something, but because of the difficulty of finding the conflict. Perhaps the closest to conflict I have is Drake versus Avery and Libby. To be honest, it was a snooze fest of a conflict. The amount of times Drake is brought up because of something he did is less than 10 times. He has done exactly 6 malicious deeds, which are being an abusive boyfriend 3 times over, defamation of Avery, shooting up Avery and Jameson, and attempting to kill Avery, Alisa who’s one of Avery’s lawyers, and Oren who’s Avery’s main bodyguard. Compare this to any other villain you know, like Voldemort. Think about everything he’s done that gave him the title of he-who-shall-not-be-named. And then we have Drake, who’s most certainly the poster boy of realistic and boring villains. This is a book where a billionaire leaves everything to a random teenager whom he had a singular conversation with, and that conversation was 2 sentences long. And that billionaire hosted a whole scavenger hunt to explain everything about that decision. I’m not here for realism. I’m here for excitement, adventure, anything except realism. And yet the author completely ditches the entire nature of her book to a villain that brings up the least interesting, most forced-into-your-throat conflicts I have ever seen. These conflicts are the melatonin of conflicts. There is practically nothing in the precise 6 times he did anything wrong that does anything but enhance the drama. There is no reason for these conflicts to be in the book if they don’t have a larger meaning to them, such as increasing the frequency and intensity of his deeds and, this might be kind of far-fetched, but just maybe he should have any reason at all to do what he does give this book a memorable villain that will stick with the reader for ages. To summarize, the conflict in this book is the boring part, and while it may not be intentional, it makes me want to go to sleep.

I’m starting to think this may not be a very good book, but surely there’s some sort of overarching theme about the story, right? Well, do you remember how I said that the conflict was only the 2nd hardest part of the book to write about? This part was the hardest for the same reason the conflict was hard to write about. The main difference is that the conflict was possible to be found in a week when reading the book blind with no outside help. That’s right, it took me a full week to find anything resembling a theme. Do you want to hear the one theme I spent an entire 7 days trying to figure out? It’s letting go. Throughout the portion of the book where we know the day and month when Emily, another cousin of the Hawthornes, died, we’re reminded about something Avery’s mom said before her death. She said that she had a secret about Avery’s date of birth. Avery was born on the same day and month Emily died. Throughout that entire part, the reader is led to believe that Avery’s mom somehow knew Tobias Hawthorne and that the connection between Avery’s birth and Emily’s death wasn’t a coincidence. However, when we get to the end of the book, Avery and the grandsons open a box with 5 letters, one for each person. There are no more clues to something greater that the gang is left with, and what they were given was the end of the line. At this point, both the reader and Avery are led to believe that it really was just a coincidence, that what her mom was thinking of was completely different and that Tobias selected Avery because she was a random girl that had a coincidental yet ominously reminiscent birthday that had a funny little name, as Avery’s full name is Avery Kylie Grambs, an anagram for A Very Risky Gamble. What Tobias left her was a packet of sugar which is probably no longer FDA approved because one time, Avery was stacking sugar packets at a diner and her mom used her full name when talking to her about it. Tobias was, for whatever reason, in the room when this was happening and asked Avery if she could spell her full name. She did. Coming back to the present, there seems to be no other way Tobias could have known Avery, so the only possible conclusion is that he used Avery as a tool to bring the grandsons together for one final puzzle. There was nothing her mother had to do with the Hawthorne story and there’s something else she was talking about. Additionally, the fact that there were seemingly no more clues to be found proves that the one time at the diner was the reason why Avery was selected and that was simply the truth, albeit a hard one. At the end of the day, she couldn’t hold on to something her mom said years ago or a game that was already completed and she just had to forget about both. That’s right, it took me a week to come up with a glorified logical fallacy that had to have been the theme of the book because nothing else was filling the seat in. I have searched this book far and wide and there cannot be another thing adjacent to a theme. I say that what has to be the theme of the book is a logical fallacy because even though what Avery’s mom was talking about had nothing to do with the Hawthornes, she was still talking about a secret that hasn’t been discovered yet. And with Avery’s newfound resources, surely she could have sent a lawyer to research what happened on the day she was born? If she cared that much, she should have acted on it. And how does she know there weren’t any other hints in what Tobias gave the Hawthorne grandsons? There is no reason for her to have simply forgotten about it the way she did, and it infuriates me to no end, similarly to anything about this book in general. To summarize, the theme is letting go, even if it was portrayed in such an odd way that detracts from the theme.

Alright. I don’t know what to say about this book anymore. What about the narrator’s point of view? The book is written in first person and it never switches characters. That’s okay, but sometimes in this book I feel like it should switch over to Libby or one of the grandsons. Avery’s narration gets pretty boring, but in this book, being bored is like brushing your teeth, it’s normal. To be honest, the reason why I’m saying that the POV is the best part of the book is because it’s not infuriating on any extreme, just uninteresting. There’s nothing special to note about it because it’s not special in any way. It’s just inoffensive. And it is for this reason that this paragraph is by far the shortest paragraph in this essay. To summarize, the narrator’s POV isn’t interesting and is pretty bland.

Alright, we are now down to the last part of this essay, the setting of the book. This is also the longest part of the essay due to a number of reasons. The setting at the beginning of the book is Avery’s high school. The book starts off with Avery solving a test that was deliberately made impossible by the teacher that assigned it. But here’s the thing: that test was never brought up again. So why exactly was it in the book? I don’t know. There’s so much buildup around the test in the first part of the book only for it to be diminished immediately. Also, if it was made to be impossible, why exactly is it that she was able to get a 100% on it just by studying? And if this is the case, how come nobody got a 100% on the test before? How was this allowed? Are these tests graded? If so, how are people supposed to get a 100 for the class? So many kids could have gotten a GPA of 4.0 to get into the greatest colleges in the world but can’t because this teacher just didn’t think things through. Now, this paragraph is already longer than the previous one by a few lines and we’re not even a tenth through it yet, so I would like to move through my frustration at that teacher right now. Moving on, we now have Hawthorne House. It’s a huge house that, according to Jameson who’s one of the grandons, regularly has a construction crew in it that he never encounters without trying to evade them. At the end of the book, there are these objects that have a poem scribbled onto them. You were supposed to read the poem and try to follow its instructions to get to the next step in the game. These were found in locations where there were 10 and 18 of something because Emily died on 10/18. These, however, were only found at the end of the book. You didn’t have to do anything to actually access these parts of the house where there were 10 and 18 of something. You could literally skip pretty much the entire game if you were to just find one of the objects, because please keep in mind that you only need 1 in order to progress. What was the point of the game if Tobias made it that easy to just skip all of it? Wait, actually, speaking of humongous skips in the puzzle, let me do myself one better. What if I told you that Avery and the grandsons could literally have just gone straight to the 2nd to last part of the puzzle in a way that’s perfectly reasonable? At the very end of the book, the last part of the game involves a secret basement that nobody knew about until they got this far into the game. But the floorboard covering the staircase was loose and was in the one part of the house everyone was at for the reading of the will. So surely someone could have just accidentally stepped on the loose floorboard and the grandsons could have just pried open the board in order to just get right to the end? They all knew their grandfather and loose floorboards were used in puzzles in the game before, so surely it's perfectly reasonable to assume that this is no exception, right? While this skip is a bit more of a stretch than the last one since it does rely on unknown and incalculable probabilities, why did Tobias go through all this effort to make this whole thing when they literally could have gone straight to the end without even meaning to? If they stepped on the floorboard, this book could have been 50 pages long at maximum. If they didn’t but went for the more obvious strategy of accidentally stumbling upon an object, then the book could have been 60 pages long at maximum. But in the parts of the game that could have been shaved off, there are things that just don’t make sense in any way, shape, or form. The first thing that’s nonsensical is that there’s an entire wing of the house that’s just locked off. There is no reason for it to be locked off, as its purpose was to be the play area for the grandsons when they were younger. What kind of health and safety hazard was within it? They explore it a bit and find that there is none, but there is the next clue in a desk that was sealed off from the rest of the house for whatever reason. Speaking of, when Avery asked Oren about Davenports, a type of desk, within Hawthorne House, he started taking her to libraries in the house. Now, surely there are other rooms in the house that have desks, right? Offices, bedrooms, maybe attics and basements, and that’s only off the top of my head. How did Oren know that the Davenport was in a library? In fact, how did he know that it wasn’t in the law offices that Avery’s lawyers work at? And the next and last thing that doesn’t make sense is that there’s a distinct lack of direction everywhere you go in this house. There’s a part about the first puzzle of the game that’s coming up in a page or so. Also, where exactly do the characters go to find the Davenport? And where do they go in the West Brook? Is there even anything to see in the Black Woods? Those were things I just had to vent about for a bit, back to our regularly scheduled program. If the grandsons didn’t go for the huge skips that go straight for the end of the book, they could have made a number of skips throughout that would still have cut down on the number of pages this book would’ve had. For example, when the first 2 or 3 numbers that would be necessary for the passcode were revealed, or maybe even 1 of one of the grandsons were smart enough, they could have just remembered about the day Emily died. In fact, I deem it impressive that they didn’t. Given how large an impact that moment made on their lives and how heavily those numbers were pushed onto them throughout it, they should instantly be able to recognize what the numbers mean, cutting down at least 50 pages from the book, making the total amount of pages in the book anywhere between 322 and 122, depending on what and which numbers they skipped. Also, in the beginning of the game, the very first puzzle is to search for a book that doesn’t match its cover. Before we cover the actual skip, we need to discuss just how poorly designed this part was assuming there wasn’t anything the group didn’t skip by accident. Hawthorne House has five libraries in total, each of them hosting a lot of books. Given how Avery, Jameson, and sometimes Grayson all spent hours at a time on multiple sessions searching for the one book, it can be assumed that there are probably over 1,000 books in the house, possibly 1,000 per library if we had known some unknown and incalculable variables such as the rate of how quickly everyone checked the books, exactly how long each session was, etc. etc. There is no further guidance on what to find other than a book that doesn’t match its cover. It is entirely possible that everyone could have spent a minimum of a month searching for the one book and still not know where it is. Have you ever searched for something for so long that you eventually forget what you were looking for? The only two people who were even playing the game at the start were Avery and Jameson. It would take a week at least with all 4 of the grandsons and Avery playing, so imagine just how long it could potentially take with only Avery, Jameson, and occasionally Grayson. I would imagine that if we maintained the work team that the book put together, which you should know at this point, and we made the correct book the very last book they picked, it would add… Actually, if I’m being perfectly honest, I think that it would only really add half a page at absolute maximum. I bet that every author with at least 1 published book in the world, regardless of how good or bad, can understand how boring just reading about a few people pulling out books and putting that back in for an extended amount of time can be. Now, onto how many pages having the perfect luck for this part would skip. If I’m being honest, I think it would skip out on 5-7 pages because they genuinely work at it for about that long. Honestly, I wish the author just put Avery and Jameson to work and just instantly cut to the part where they find a book. There’s nothing that important in the part where they just pull out book after book, so we can just do away with all of it. And for the last skip that comes to mind, it’s actually at the 2nd to last part that the group could have cut to by prying the floorboard early. Xavier can skip the 2nd to last part. When the group finally discovers the basement, it was only Avery and Xavier who actually found it. At the end of the basement, there is a puzzle that requires the handprints of the 4 Hawthorne grandsons. Now, earlier in the book, Xavier is found missing an eyebrow because a robot that he made exploded into his face. I mention this because this verifies that Xavier has a good understanding of how technology like handprints works. So Xavier could have skipped having to get the other 3 grandsons together, especially considering that Jameson stormed out of the puzzle when it was revealed that the game revolved around the date 10/18, just by getting whatever he uses to program robots to reconfigure the handprints into being flagged as having been pressed. This would have saved 3-5 pages of the book. To summarize the potential time saves in this book, here’s a table showing how many pages that we could have had if the characters found skips and what skips they found.


Skips used | Pages in the hypothetical book

The skip that goes straight to the basement |45-47 max.

and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that goes straight to the |50 max.

basement | ㅤ

|

The skip that uses the objects’ poor hiding |55-57 max.

spots and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that uses the objects |60 max. ㅤ

|

The skip where a Hawthorne recognizes |117-319

the date early on and the 2nd to last puzzle|

skip | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |110-314 ㅤ

|

Only the skip where a Hawthorne |122-322

recognizes the date early on | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |115-317 ㅤ


Now, you might be wondering why I even bothered looking at time saves in this essay when it seems so outrageously out of place that you could mistake it for a guide on speedrunning a video game. You see, there’s a reason why these skips are in this book, and it’s for one reason and one reason only. The setting and the story behind it was simply poorly designed. Imagine if the real life golden owl hunt was this easy to solve. The guy who made the whole puzzle had to think of witty clues that are difficult but reasonable to solve, he had to actually select a location, he had to do so much for this singular statue of an owl. Now imagine if a bunch of teens skipped the whole game because they saw a gold glitter that was bright enough that it could blind people if they looked straight at it in the dirt. That’s pretty much how this book is, except the teens don’t notice the gold glitter until they see a bunch of people with their copies of “On the Trail of the Golden Owl” pointing at it and then suddenly they see it and somehow muscle everyone away for the treasure to be theirs. This is just a badly designed game set up by a badly designed setting. Everything would have been so much better if the clues were better hidden and if the kids had a better sense of what they were doing, which is also a fault of the setting because everything in the setting was set up by Tobias, who didn’t give them enough to reasonably win the game. Authors should remember that settings are the most important parts of the book. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the setting, such as it containing obvious clues that no person would miss even if they were blind and deaf that the characters somehow just don’t quite catch onto, then that flaw leaks into the rest of the book, ruining the immersive experience in ways that are just impossible to comprehend until you read the book for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll have characters who simultaneously think that the sun isn’t as big as it is because there’s dark in space and solve a Rubik’s cube with their hands tied behind their back while underwater while playing themselves into a winning position against a chess grandmaster while watching Rick and Morty on top of all of that. It’s actually crazy how much a good setting is necessary for a good book and how badly a poorly-done setting can negatively affect the overall experience someone can get by reading the book. A good example of the former, a good setting, is Harry Potter. The series didn’t take place in a normal campus or a regular old castle, no, it took place in a magic castle which was, in a sense, a character in of itself. Imagine how different the book would be if the staircases didn’t move all over the place or if there wasn’t a hut with a man named Hagrid who could probably be a pro wrestler but instead decided to teach children about magic stuff residing in it on campus. Now of course, fantasy is very different from mystery, so how about we get another good setting from the mystery genre? Now, what if I told you that the board game Clue had a better setting than the book? Clue takes place in a mansion and your goal is to find out which character killed an unnamed victim. The mansion has nine rooms the players explore, and each room is perfectly reasonable for a mansion to have. They are, in order, a kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, a hall, a study, a library, a billiard room, a conservatory, a ballroom, and an inaccessible cellar that contains the answers to the murder. When a player moves to the room, they have to make a suggestion as to who did the crime, where they did it, and what weapon they used. The tokens containing everything the person mentioned are moved into the room. If the player calls out something the player to their left has in their hand in the form of cards, the player to the left shows one of the called-out things to the turn player. Also, other players have to disprove the suggestion if they can. This makes it so as the game progresses, the players find out more and more about the murder and there are no inconsistencies in what a person knows or should know, and you don’t have someone suddenly noticing something that should have been noticed way before, such as the objects scattered around Hawthorne House that were only noticed way into the game when they were sitting in plain sight in pretty much every room of the house. Now, why is it that the setting of Clue, a board game that’s not supposed to have such a good setting, is so much better than the setting of something that’s supposed to have a really nice setting? It’s because of how much information each setting gives off. You should know the abundance of info Hawthorne House gives early that allows the players to skip straight to the end of the book if they were attentive enough, while the setting in Clue doesn’t allow for any form of progression skips, making it much more immersive than the book, which is supposed to be super immersive. And to finally finish off the final part of this essay, I shall now explain one last reason why the setting in The Inheritance Games isn’t a good setting. It’s because of the sheer overcomplexity and anti-sensibility of everything. This house has rooms upon rooms and none of them are necessary in the slightest. I would assume that the purpose of a solarium, a room with a glass dome, would be to have plants grow indoors, no? Well, the solarium in Hawthorne House just has the room for no apparent reason. It’s literally just there. Avery didn’t know what a solarium was before visiting, and there were no plants in it. If you wanted to sunbathe, you could just go outside and do it. Another weird room is the movie theater. Surely this house that has a room per starving person Tobias could have fed if he was willing to give back to his community has 1 or more living room(s)? Why don’t they just watch TV in those places because a house this size should have more than 1 living room instead of making everyone go on a thousand-year odyssey just to see Morbius? Also, do you remember the basement from the skips? How was that allowed? There’s no way that anything about it was OSHA-approved. A staircase that makes you go down two stairs at a time that also has no railings? There are amazingly large mortality risks from that. A huge basement with only 1 exit? If a fire starts down there, well, let’s hope they were all near the exit. And there is absolutely no way that they would let a basement with no form of constant restoration slide. If the ceiling breaks, half the house is going to just slide off. And the reason why I bring up these logic and OSHA violations is that this book takes place in the real world. The author is writing human characters that have human needs and laws they have to follow. And these rooms break everything in terms of both convenience and law. The book takes place in Texas, but if OSHA lets that cellar slide, then it might as well take place in Narnia. Now, just because books take place in the real world doesn’t mean that the characters have to follow the laws. But this is a building that was legally required to be approved by OSHA before being built. So how and why, may I ask, does it exist? That’s not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know. To summarize the section that takes up about half of the essay, the setting, there are skips the characters could have done to turn this 372-page novel into a 45-page novella, the setting was set up to make the characters look as if they aren’t the brightest bulb on the chandelier, and nothing about the setting makes logical or legal sense.

To summarize this essay, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg.

For this summer, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg. Here’s why I strongly disliked my choice.

Let’s look at the protagonist, Avery. She feels like a generic character that’s only important because the plot made her inherent billions. She doesn’t really do anything with her money, even though she was, at one point in the book, thinking about all the good she could do with her newfound fortune. It’s a really underdeveloped idea and was only really brought up in that one scene. She had an entire law office to herself, so if she really wanted to, she could have consulted her lawyers about stuff she could do that would help around the local community or something. She doesn’t, and while it seems boring on paper, there could be something about, say, a sudden influx of murders and robberies, and she could make vigilante robots to take the evildoers down or something to that effect. The fact that Avery doesn’t even do something with her money makes it seem like she’s a screwdriver; she only actually needs to be there in the most specific scenarios that only ever happen in this book. In some parts of the book, there were parts where I thought that I was supposed to project myself onto Avery, but what’s happening to her is such an out-there situation that I find it really hard to relate. In terms of character development, she doesn’t really learn anything from the start of the book to the end. Really, I was curious as to how she would grow as a person from this experience from the beginning, and the answer to that question was that she wouldn’t. Something I strongly disliked about the book was that the first solution that came to Avery’s head was always the correct one, which detracts from the book as a whole because if every one of her guesses is the right one, how can she grow from making mistakes? Honestly the way Avery was written set her character up to fail. Also, in the first half of the house, she occasionally gives advice on chess. Disregard all of it. As someone who competitively plays chess every once in a while and even has an official rating with the USCF (albeit it’s in the 500s, which isn’t too good), all of the advice is complete gibberish. To summarize about our protagonist, she doesn’t feel like a person, more like a plot device that gives bad chess advice.

So if you couldn’t already tell, I dislike the main character and how she was written, so what about the antagonist? Avery’s sister named Libby’s abusive boyfriend named Drake acts as the antagonist for this book. He’s a terrible person, he’s a physical abuser and tried to kill Avery twice, but really, he’s not that interesting. The only thing different setting him apart from comic books from the 50s or 60s is the realism of what he does. While those villains were out there doing dumb things to dominate the world, he was doing things real abusers do. But in the end, both the comic book villains and Drake seem to only do what they do for 1 reason and 1 reason only; they can. There was never a point in the book where even the slightest hint of a motive was revealed. Similarly to Avery, he never grew as a character throughout the book and the only resolution we got from him is that he was sent to prison, which, given everything we’ve seen him do, is the most realistic outcome, but certainly not the most satisfying. Honestly, Grayson, one of Tobias Hawthornes’ grandsons, would have made a better villain. Tobias is the billionaire who left everything to Avery. Grayson’s entire family, who he loves dearly, was just disinherited to this seemingly random girl who, without any further context, seemed to have somehow manipulated his old, decaying grandpa. He was left with nothing by his own grandfather, and he will do anything to reclaim his family’s name from the girl behind the world’s largest exploitation of the vulnerable. I would love to see a version of the book where Libby is single and the main antagonist is Grayson. Just ditch Drake, he’s pretty much there to enhance the drama. But later on, it’s revealed that Skye Laughlin, the Hawthorne grandsons’ mother, helped Drake in his first attempt at Avery’s life. I mean, there was technically a hint to this, the hint being when she cheekily said that she made it her duty to befriend everyone who disinherits her family, but when she says that in that point of the book, there is no former direction for the reader to know what to make of it. Something as subtle as a mention of the pronunciation “dr” coming from a room Avery walked by would be cool, but instead, it seems as if the author thought that something unexpected happening with no proper build up beforehand would make a good twist. If I were the author, I would make the gunman Rachael, a cousin of the Hawthorne grandsons, because she was the one with the most proper buildup for the reveal moment due to her lack of alibi and she’s the child of Zara and Constantine, two people who are also apart of the Hawthorne family and strongly despise Rachael due to obvious reasons. Zara and Constantine could have somehow talked her into opening fire like some sort of necessary evil thing. Nobody would have wanted to do it, but to them, they would have to in order to reclaim the Hawthorne name. To summarize, the antagonists are either one-dimensional, not used to their full potential, or have the oddest reveals in the history of literature.

Alright. The characters don’t seem to be very well written. Surely the conflict will step up in quality, right? Well, to tell you the truth, the conflict was the second hardest thing to write about in this essay. Not because it’s a really powerful aspect of the book and I can’t say it in words without disrespecting it or something, but because of the difficulty of finding the conflict. Perhaps the closest to conflict I have is Drake versus Avery and Libby. To be honest, it was a snooze fest of a conflict. The amount of times Drake is brought up because of something he did is less than 10 times. He has done exactly 6 malicious deeds, which are being an abusive boyfriend 3 times over, defamation of Avery, shooting up Avery and Jameson, and attempting to kill Avery, Alisa who’s one of Avery’s lawyers, and Oren who’s Avery’s main bodyguard. Compare this to any other villain you know, like Voldemort. Think about everything he’s done that gave him the title of he-who-shall-not-be-named. And then we have Drake, who’s most certainly the poster boy of realistic and boring villains. This is a book where a billionaire leaves everything to a random teenager whom he had a singular conversation with, and that conversation was 2 sentences long. And that billionaire hosted a whole scavenger hunt to explain everything about that decision. I’m not here for realism. I’m here for excitement, adventure, anything except realism. And yet the author completely ditches the entire nature of her book to a villain that brings up the least interesting, most forced-into-your-throat conflicts I have ever seen. These conflicts are the melatonin of conflicts. There is practically nothing in the precise 6 times he did anything wrong that does anything but enhance the drama. There is no reason for these conflicts to be in the book if they don’t have a larger meaning to them, such as increasing the frequency and intensity of his deeds and, this might be kind of far-fetched, but just maybe he should have any reason at all to do what he does give this book a memorable villain that will stick with the reader for ages. To summarize, the conflict in this book is the boring part, and while it may not be intentional, it makes me want to go to sleep.

I’m starting to think this may not be a very good book, but surely there’s some sort of overarching theme about the story, right? Well, do you remember how I said that the conflict was only the 2nd hardest part of the book to write about? This part was the hardest for the same reason the conflict was hard to write about. The main difference is that the conflict was possible to be found in a week when reading the book blind with no outside help. That’s right, it took me a full week to find anything resembling a theme. Do you want to hear the one theme I spent an entire 7 days trying to figure out? It’s letting go. Throughout the portion of the book where we know the day and month when Emily, another cousin of the Hawthornes, died, we’re reminded about something Avery’s mom said before her death. She said that she had a secret about Avery’s date of birth. Avery was born on the same day and month Emily died. Throughout that entire part, the reader is led to believe that Avery’s mom somehow knew Tobias Hawthorne and that the connection between Avery’s birth and Emily’s death wasn’t a coincidence. However, when we get to the end of the book, Avery and the grandsons open a box with 5 letters, one for each person. There are no more clues to something greater that the gang is left with, and what they were given was the end of the line. At this point, both the reader and Avery are led to believe that it really was just a coincidence, that what her mom was thinking of was completely different and that Tobias selected Avery because she was a random girl that had a coincidental yet ominously reminiscent birthday that had a funny little name, as Avery’s full name is Avery Kylie Grambs, an anagram for A Very Risky Gamble. What Tobias left her was a packet of sugar which is probably no longer FDA approved because one time, Avery was stacking sugar packets at a diner and her mom used her full name when talking to her about it. Tobias was, for whatever reason, in the room when this was happening and asked Avery if she could spell her full name. She did. Coming back to the present, there seems to be no other way Tobias could have known Avery, so the only possible conclusion is that he used Avery as a tool to bring the grandsons together for one final puzzle. There was nothing her mother had to do with the Hawthorne story and there’s something else she was talking about. Additionally, the fact that there were seemingly no more clues to be found proves that the one time at the diner was the reason why Avery was selected and that was simply the truth, albeit a hard one. At the end of the day, she couldn’t hold on to something her mom said years ago or a game that was already completed and she just had to forget about both. That’s right, it took me a week to come up with a glorified logical fallacy that had to have been the theme of the book because nothing else was filling the seat in. I have searched this book far and wide and there cannot be another thing adjacent to a theme. I say that what has to be the theme of the book is a logical fallacy because even though what Avery’s mom was talking about had nothing to do with the Hawthornes, she was still talking about a secret that hasn’t been discovered yet. And with Avery’s newfound resources, surely she could have sent a lawyer to research what happened on the day she was born? If she cared that much, she should have acted on it. And how does she know there weren’t any other hints in what Tobias gave the Hawthorne grandsons? There is no reason for her to have simply forgotten about it the way she did, and it infuriates me to no end, similarly to anything about this book in general. To summarize, the theme is letting go, even if it was portrayed in such an odd way that detracts from the theme.

Alright. I don’t know what to say about this book anymore. What about the narrator’s point of view? The book is written in first person and it never switches characters. That’s okay, but sometimes in this book I feel like it should switch over to Libby or one of the grandsons. Avery’s narration gets pretty boring, but in this book, being bored is like brushing your teeth, it’s normal. To be honest, the reason why I’m saying that the POV is the best part of the book is because it’s not infuriating on any extreme, just uninteresting. There’s nothing special to note about it because it’s not special in any way. It’s just inoffensive. And it is for this reason that this paragraph is by far the shortest paragraph in this essay. To summarize, the narrator’s POV isn’t interesting and is pretty bland.

Alright, we are now down to the last part of this essay, the setting of the book. This is also the longest part of the essay due to a number of reasons. The setting at the beginning of the book is Avery’s high school. The book starts off with Avery solving a test that was deliberately made impossible by the teacher that assigned it. But here’s the thing: that test was never brought up again. So why exactly was it in the book? I don’t know. There’s so much buildup around the test in the first part of the book only for it to be diminished immediately. Also, if it was made to be impossible, why exactly is it that she was able to get a 100% on it just by studying? And if this is the case, how come nobody got a 100% on the test before? How was this allowed? Are these tests graded? If so, how are people supposed to get a 100 for the class? So many kids could have gotten a GPA of 4.0 to get into the greatest colleges in the world but can’t because this teacher just didn’t think things through. Now, this paragraph is already longer than the previous one by a few lines and we’re not even a tenth through it yet, so I would like to move through my frustration at that teacher right now. Moving on, we now have Hawthorne House. It’s a huge house that, according to Jameson who’s one of the grandons, regularly has a construction crew in it that he never encounters without trying to evade them. At the end of the book, there are these objects that have a poem scribbled onto them. You were supposed to read the poem and try to follow its instructions to get to the next step in the game. These were found in locations where there were 10 and 18 of something because Emily died on 10/18. These, however, were only found at the end of the book. You didn’t have to do anything to actually access these parts of the house where there were 10 and 18 of something. You could literally skip pretty much the entire game if you were to just find one of the objects, because please keep in mind that you only need 1 in order to progress. What was the point of the game if Tobias made it that easy to just skip all of it? Wait, actually, speaking of humongous skips in the puzzle, let me do myself one better. What if I told you that Avery and the grandsons could literally have just gone straight to the 2nd to last part of the puzzle in a way that’s perfectly reasonable? At the very end of the book, the last part of the game involves a secret basement that nobody knew about until they got this far into the game. But the floorboard covering the staircase was loose and was in the one part of the house everyone was at for the reading of the will. So surely someone could have just accidentally stepped on the loose floorboard and the grandsons could have just pried open the board in order to just get right to the end? They all knew their grandfather and loose floorboards were used in puzzles in the game before, so surely it's perfectly reasonable to assume that this is no exception, right? While this skip is a bit more of a stretch than the last one since it does rely on unknown and incalculable probabilities, why did Tobias go through all this effort to make this whole thing when they literally could have gone straight to the end without even meaning to? If they stepped on the floorboard, this book could have been 50 pages long at maximum. If they didn’t but went for the more obvious strategy of accidentally stumbling upon an object, then the book could have been 60 pages long at maximum. But in the parts of the game that could have been shaved off, there are things that just don’t make sense in any way, shape, or form. The first thing that’s nonsensical is that there’s an entire wing of the house that’s just locked off. There is no reason for it to be locked off, as its purpose was to be the play area for the grandsons when they were younger. What kind of health and safety hazard was within it? They explore it a bit and find that there is none, but there is the next clue in a desk that was sealed off from the rest of the house for whatever reason. Speaking of, when Avery asked Oren about Davenports, a type of desk, within Hawthorne House, he started taking her to libraries in the house. Now, surely there are other rooms in the house that have desks, right? Offices, bedrooms, maybe attics and basements, and that’s only off the top of my head. How did Oren know that the Davenport was in a library? In fact, how did he know that it wasn’t in the law offices that Avery’s lawyers work at? And the next and last thing that doesn’t make sense is that there’s a distinct lack of direction everywhere you go in this house. There’s a part about the first puzzle of the game that’s coming up in a page or so. Also, where exactly do the characters go to find the Davenport? And where do they go in the West Brook? Is there even anything to see in the Black Woods? Those were things I just had to vent about for a bit, back to our regularly scheduled program. If the grandsons didn’t go for the huge skips that go straight for the end of the book, they could have made a number of skips throughout that would still have cut down on the number of pages this book would’ve had. For example, when the first 2 or 3 numbers that would be necessary for the passcode were revealed, or maybe even 1 of one of the grandsons were smart enough, they could have just remembered about the day Emily died. In fact, I deem it impressive that they didn’t. Given how large an impact that moment made on their lives and how heavily those numbers were pushed onto them throughout it, they should instantly be able to recognize what the numbers mean, cutting down at least 50 pages from the book, making the total amount of pages in the book anywhere between 322 and 122, depending on what and which numbers they skipped. Also, in the beginning of the game, the very first puzzle is to search for a book that doesn’t match its cover. Before we cover the actual skip, we need to discuss just how poorly designed this part was assuming there wasn’t anything the group didn’t skip by accident. Hawthorne House has five libraries in total, each of them hosting a lot of books. Given how Avery, Jameson, and sometimes Grayson all spent hours at a time on multiple sessions searching for the one book, it can be assumed that there are probably over 1,000 books in the house, possibly 1,000 per library if we had known some unknown and incalculable variables such as the rate of how quickly everyone checked the books, exactly how long each session was, etc. etc. There is no further guidance on what to find other than a book that doesn’t match its cover. It is entirely possible that everyone could have spent a minimum of a month searching for the one book and still not know where it is. Have you ever searched for something for so long that you eventually forget what you were looking for? The only two people who were even playing the game at the start were Avery and Jameson. It would take a week at least with all 4 of the grandsons and Avery playing, so imagine just how long it could potentially take with only Avery, Jameson, and occasionally Grayson. I would imagine that if we maintained the work team that the book put together, which you should know at this point, and we made the correct book the very last book they picked, it would add… Actually, if I’m being perfectly honest, I think that it would only really add half a page at absolute maximum. I bet that every author with at least 1 published book in the world, regardless of how good or bad, can understand how boring just reading about a few people pulling out books and putting that back in for an extended amount of time can be. Now, onto how many pages having the perfect luck for this part would skip. If I’m being honest, I think it would skip out on 5-7 pages because they genuinely work at it for about that long. Honestly, I wish the author just put Avery and Jameson to work and just instantly cut to the part where they find a book. There’s nothing that important in the part where they just pull out book after book, so we can just do away with all of it. And for the last skip that comes to mind, it’s actually at the 2nd to last part that the group could have cut to by prying the floorboard early. Xavier can skip the 2nd to last part. When the group finally discovers the basement, it was only Avery and Xavier who actually found it. At the end of the basement, there is a puzzle that requires the handprints of the 4 Hawthorne grandsons. Now, earlier in the book, Xavier is found missing an eyebrow because a robot that he made exploded into his face. I mention this because this verifies that Xavier has a good understanding of how technology like handprints works. So Xavier could have skipped having to get the other 3 grandsons together, especially considering that Jameson stormed out of the puzzle when it was revealed that the game revolved around the date 10/18, just by getting whatever he uses to program robots to reconfigure the handprints into being flagged as having been pressed. This would have saved 3-5 pages of the book. To summarize the potential time saves in this book, here’s a table showing how many pages that we could have had if the characters found skips and what skips they found.


Skips used | Pages in the hypothetical book

The skip that goes straight to the basement |45-47 max.

and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that goes straight to the |50 max.

basement | ㅤ

|

The skip that uses the objects’ poor hiding |55-57 max.

spots and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that uses the objects |60 max. ㅤ

|

The skip where a Hawthorne recognizes |117-319

the date early on and the 2nd to last puzzle|

skip | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |110-314 ㅤ

|

Only the skip where a Hawthorne |122-322

recognizes the date early on | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |115-317 ㅤ


Now, you might be wondering why I even bothered looking at time saves in this essay when it seems so outrageously out of place that you could mistake it for a guide on speedrunning a video game. You see, there’s a reason why these skips are in this book, and it’s for one reason and one reason only. The setting and the story behind it was simply poorly designed. Imagine if the real life golden owl hunt was this easy to solve. The guy who made the whole puzzle had to think of witty clues that are difficult but reasonable to solve, he had to actually select a location, he had to do so much for this singular statue of an owl. Now imagine if a bunch of teens skipped the whole game because they saw a gold glitter that was bright enough that it could blind people if they looked straight at it in the dirt. That’s pretty much how this book is, except the teens don’t notice the gold glitter until they see a bunch of people with their copies of “On the Trail of the Golden Owl” pointing at it and then suddenly they see it and somehow muscle everyone away for the treasure to be theirs. This is just a badly designed game set up by a badly designed setting. Everything would have been so much better if the clues were better hidden and if the kids had a better sense of what they were doing, which is also a fault of the setting because everything in the setting was set up by Tobias, who didn’t give them enough to reasonably win the game. Authors should remember that settings are the most important parts of the book. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the setting, such as it containing obvious clues that no person would miss even if they were blind and deaf that the characters somehow just don’t quite catch onto, then that flaw leaks into the rest of the book, ruining the immersive experience in ways that are just impossible to comprehend until you read the book for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll have characters who simultaneously think that the sun isn’t as big as it is because there’s dark in space and solve a Rubik’s cube with their hands tied behind their back while underwater while playing themselves into a winning position against a chess grandmaster while watching Rick and Morty on top of all of that. It’s actually crazy how much a good setting is necessary for a good book and how badly a poorly-done setting can negatively affect the overall experience someone can get by reading the book. A good example of the former, a good setting, is Harry Potter. The series didn’t take place in a normal campus or a regular old castle, no, it took place in a magic castle which was, in a sense, a character in of itself. Imagine how different the book would be if the staircases didn’t move all over the place or if there wasn’t a hut with a man named Hagrid who could probably be a pro wrestler but instead decided to teach children about magic stuff residing in it on campus. Now of course, fantasy is very different from mystery, so how about we get another good setting from the mystery genre? Now, what if I told you that the board game Clue had a better setting than the book? Clue takes place in a mansion and your goal is to find out which character killed an unnamed victim. The mansion has nine rooms the players explore, and each room is perfectly reasonable for a mansion to have. They are, in order, a kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, a hall, a study, a library, a billiard room, a conservatory, a ballroom, and an inaccessible cellar that contains the answers to the murder. When a player moves to the room, they have to make a suggestion as to who did the crime, where they did it, and what weapon they used. The tokens containing everything the person mentioned are moved into the room. If the player calls out something the player to their left has in their hand in the form of cards, the player to the left shows one of the called-out things to the turn player. Also, other players have to disprove the suggestion if they can. This makes it so as the game progresses, the players find out more and more about the murder and there are no inconsistencies in what a person knows or should know, and you don’t have someone suddenly noticing something that should have been noticed way before, such as the objects scattered around Hawthorne House that were only noticed way into the game when they were sitting in plain sight in pretty much every room of the house. Now, why is it that the setting of Clue, a board game that’s not supposed to have such a good setting, is so much better than the setting of something that’s supposed to have a really nice setting? It’s because of how much information each setting gives off. You should know the abundance of info Hawthorne House gives early that allows the players to skip straight to the end of the book if they were attentive enough, while the setting in Clue doesn’t allow for any form of progression skips, making it much more immersive than the book, which is supposed to be super immersive. And to finally finish off the final part of this essay, I shall now explain one last reason why the setting in The Inheritance Games isn’t a good setting. It’s because of the sheer overcomplexity and anti-sensibility of everything. This house has rooms upon rooms and none of them are necessary in the slightest. I would assume that the purpose of a solarium, a room with a glass dome, would be to have plants grow indoors, no? Well, the solarium in Hawthorne House just has the room for no apparent reason. It’s literally just there. Avery didn’t know what a solarium was before visiting, and there were no plants in it. If you wanted to sunbathe, you could just go outside and do it. Another weird room is the movie theater. Surely this house that has a room per starving person Tobias could have fed if he was willing to give back to his community has 1 or more living room(s)? Why don’t they just watch TV in those places because a house this size should have more than 1 living room instead of making everyone go on a thousand-year odyssey just to see Morbius? Also, do you remember the basement from the skips? How was that allowed? There’s no way that anything about it was OSHA-approved. A staircase that makes you go down two stairs at a time that also has no railings? There are amazingly large mortality risks from that. A huge basement with only 1 exit? If a fire starts down there, well, let’s hope they were all near the exit. And there is absolutely no way that they would let a basement with no form of constant restoration slide. If the ceiling breaks, half the house is going to just slide off. And the reason why I bring up these logic and OSHA violations is that this book takes place in the real world. The author is writing human characters that have human needs and laws they have to follow. And these rooms break everything in terms of both convenience and law. The book takes place in Texas, but if OSHA lets that cellar slide, then it might as well take place in Narnia. Now, just because books take place in the real world doesn’t mean that the characters have to follow the laws. But this is a building that was legally required to be approved by OSHA before being built. So how and why, may I ask, does it exist? That’s not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know. To summarize the section that takes up about half of the essay, the setting, there are skips the characters could have done to turn this 372-page novel into a 45-page novella, the setting was set up to make the characters look as if they aren’t the brightest bulb on the chandelier, and nothing about the setting makes logical or legal sense.

To summarize this essay, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg.

For this summer, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg. Here’s why I strongly disliked my choice.

Let’s look at the protagonist, Avery. She feels like a generic character that’s only important because the plot made her inherent billions. She doesn’t really do anything with her money, even though she was, at one point in the book, thinking about all the good she could do with her newfound fortune. It’s a really underdeveloped idea and was only really brought up in that one scene. She had an entire law office to herself, so if she really wanted to, she could have consulted her lawyers about stuff she could do that would help around the local community or something. She doesn’t, and while it seems boring on paper, there could be something about, say, a sudden influx of murders and robberies, and she could make vigilante robots to take the evildoers down or something to that effect. The fact that Avery doesn’t even do something with her money makes it seem like she’s a screwdriver; she only actually needs to be there in the most specific scenarios that only ever happen in this book. In some parts of the book, there were parts where I thought that I was supposed to project myself onto Avery, but what’s happening to her is such an out-there situation that I find it really hard to relate. In terms of character development, she doesn’t really learn anything from the start of the book to the end. Really, I was curious as to how she would grow as a person from this experience from the beginning, and the answer to that question was that she wouldn’t. Something I strongly disliked about the book was that the first solution that came to Avery’s head was always the correct one, which detracts from the book as a whole because if every one of her guesses is the right one, how can she grow from making mistakes? Honestly the way Avery was written set her character up to fail. Also, in the first half of the house, she occasionally gives advice on chess. Disregard all of it. As someone who competitively plays chess every once in a while and even has an official rating with the USCF (albeit it’s in the 500s, which isn’t too good), all of the advice is complete gibberish. To summarize about our protagonist, she doesn’t feel like a person, more like a plot device that gives bad chess advice.

So if you couldn’t already tell, I dislike the main character and how she was written, so what about the antagonist? Avery’s sister named Libby’s abusive boyfriend named Drake acts as the antagonist for this book. He’s a terrible person, he’s a physical abuser and tried to kill Avery twice, but really, he’s not that interesting. The only thing different setting him apart from comic books from the 50s or 60s is the realism of what he does. While those villains were out there doing dumb things to dominate the world, he was doing things real abusers do. But in the end, both the comic book villains and Drake seem to only do what they do for 1 reason and 1 reason only; they can. There was never a point in the book where even the slightest hint of a motive was revealed. Similarly to Avery, he never grew as a character throughout the book and the only resolution we got from him is that he was sent to prison, which, given everything we’ve seen him do, is the most realistic outcome, but certainly not the most satisfying. Honestly, Grayson, one of Tobias Hawthornes’ grandsons, would have made a better villain. Tobias is the billionaire who left everything to Avery. Grayson’s entire family, who he loves dearly, was just disinherited to this seemingly random girl who, without any further context, seemed to have somehow manipulated his old, decaying grandpa. He was left with nothing by his own grandfather, and he will do anything to reclaim his family’s name from the girl behind the world’s largest exploitation of the vulnerable. I would love to see a version of the book where Libby is single and the main antagonist is Grayson. Just ditch Drake, he’s pretty much there to enhance the drama. But later on, it’s revealed that Skye Laughlin, the Hawthorne grandsons’ mother, helped Drake in his first attempt at Avery’s life. I mean, there was technically a hint to this, the hint being when she cheekily said that she made it her duty to befriend everyone who disinherits her family, but when she says that in that point of the book, there is no former direction for the reader to know what to make of it. Something as subtle as a mention of the pronunciation “dr” coming from a room Avery walked by would be cool, but instead, it seems as if the author thought that something unexpected happening with no proper build up beforehand would make a good twist. If I were the author, I would make the gunman Rachael, a cousin of the Hawthorne grandsons, because she was the one with the most proper buildup for the reveal moment due to her lack of alibi and she’s the child of Zara and Constantine, two people who are also apart of the Hawthorne family and strongly despise Rachael due to obvious reasons. Zara and Constantine could have somehow talked her into opening fire like some sort of necessary evil thing. Nobody would have wanted to do it, but to them, they would have to in order to reclaim the Hawthorne name. To summarize, the antagonists are either one-dimensional, not used to their full potential, or have the oddest reveals in the history of literature.

Alright. The characters don’t seem to be very well written. Surely the conflict will step up in quality, right? Well, to tell you the truth, the conflict was the second hardest thing to write about in this essay. Not because it’s a really powerful aspect of the book and I can’t say it in words without disrespecting it or something, but because of the difficulty of finding the conflict. Perhaps the closest to conflict I have is Drake versus Avery and Libby. To be honest, it was a snooze fest of a conflict. The amount of times Drake is brought up because of something he did is less than 10 times. He has done exactly 6 malicious deeds, which are being an abusive boyfriend 3 times over, defamation of Avery, shooting up Avery and Jameson, and attempting to kill Avery, Alisa who’s one of Avery’s lawyers, and Oren who’s Avery’s main bodyguard. Compare this to any other villain you know, like Voldemort. Think about everything he’s done that gave him the title of he-who-shall-not-be-named. And then we have Drake, who’s most certainly the poster boy of realistic and boring villains. This is a book where a billionaire leaves everything to a random teenager whom he had a singular conversation with, and that conversation was 2 sentences long. And that billionaire hosted a whole scavenger hunt to explain everything about that decision. I’m not here for realism. I’m here for excitement, adventure, anything except realism. And yet the author completely ditches the entire nature of her book to a villain that brings up the least interesting, most forced-into-your-throat conflicts I have ever seen. These conflicts are the melatonin of conflicts. There is practically nothing in the precise 6 times he did anything wrong that does anything but enhance the drama. There is no reason for these conflicts to be in the book if they don’t have a larger meaning to them, such as increasing the frequency and intensity of his deeds and, this might be kind of far-fetched, but just maybe he should have any reason at all to do what he does give this book a memorable villain that will stick with the reader for ages. To summarize, the conflict in this book is the boring part, and while it may not be intentional, it makes me want to go to sleep.

I’m starting to think this may not be a very good book, but surely there’s some sort of overarching theme about the story, right? Well, do you remember how I said that the conflict was only the 2nd hardest part of the book to write about? This part was the hardest for the same reason the conflict was hard to write about. The main difference is that the conflict was possible to be found in a week when reading the book blind with no outside help. That’s right, it took me a full week to find anything resembling a theme. Do you want to hear the one theme I spent an entire 7 days trying to figure out? It’s letting go. Throughout the portion of the book where we know the day and month when Emily, another cousin of the Hawthornes, died, we’re reminded about something Avery’s mom said before her death. She said that she had a secret about Avery’s date of birth. Avery was born on the same day and month Emily died. Throughout that entire part, the reader is led to believe that Avery’s mom somehow knew Tobias Hawthorne and that the connection between Avery’s birth and Emily’s death wasn’t a coincidence. However, when we get to the end of the book, Avery and the grandsons open a box with 5 letters, one for each person. There are no more clues to something greater that the gang is left with, and what they were given was the end of the line. At this point, both the reader and Avery are led to believe that it really was just a coincidence, that what her mom was thinking of was completely different and that Tobias selected Avery because she was a random girl that had a coincidental yet ominously reminiscent birthday that had a funny little name, as Avery’s full name is Avery Kylie Grambs, an anagram for A Very Risky Gamble. What Tobias left her was a packet of sugar which is probably no longer FDA approved because one time, Avery was stacking sugar packets at a diner and her mom used her full name when talking to her about it. Tobias was, for whatever reason, in the room when this was happening and asked Avery if she could spell her full name. She did. Coming back to the present, there seems to be no other way Tobias could have known Avery, so the only possible conclusion is that he used Avery as a tool to bring the grandsons together for one final puzzle. There was nothing her mother had to do with the Hawthorne story and there’s something else she was talking about. Additionally, the fact that there were seemingly no more clues to be found proves that the one time at the diner was the reason why Avery was selected and that was simply the truth, albeit a hard one. At the end of the day, she couldn’t hold on to something her mom said years ago or a game that was already completed and she just had to forget about both. That’s right, it took me a week to come up with a glorified logical fallacy that had to have been the theme of the book because nothing else was filling the seat in. I have searched this book far and wide and there cannot be another thing adjacent to a theme. I say that what has to be the theme of the book is a logical fallacy because even though what Avery’s mom was talking about had nothing to do with the Hawthornes, she was still talking about a secret that hasn’t been discovered yet. And with Avery’s newfound resources, surely she could have sent a lawyer to research what happened on the day she was born? If she cared that much, she should have acted on it. And how does she know there weren’t any other hints in what Tobias gave the Hawthorne grandsons? There is no reason for her to have simply forgotten about it the way she did, and it infuriates me to no end, similarly to anything about this book in general. To summarize, the theme is letting go, even if it was portrayed in such an odd way that detracts from the theme.

Alright. I don’t know what to say about this book anymore. What about the narrator’s point of view? The book is written in first person and it never switches characters. That’s okay, but sometimes in this book I feel like it should switch over to Libby or one of the grandsons. Avery’s narration gets pretty boring, but in this book, being bored is like brushing your teeth, it’s normal. To be honest, the reason why I’m saying that the POV is the best part of the book is because it’s not infuriating on any extreme, just uninteresting. There’s nothing special to note about it because it’s not special in any way. It’s just inoffensive. And it is for this reason that this paragraph is by far the shortest paragraph in this essay. To summarize, the narrator’s POV isn’t interesting and is pretty bland.

Alright, we are now down to the last part of this essay, the setting of the book. This is also the longest part of the essay due to a number of reasons. The setting at the beginning of the book is Avery’s high school. The book starts off with Avery solving a test that was deliberately made impossible by the teacher that assigned it. But here’s the thing: that test was never brought up again. So why exactly was it in the book? I don’t know. There’s so much buildup around the test in the first part of the book only for it to be diminished immediately. Also, if it was made to be impossible, why exactly is it that she was able to get a 100% on it just by studying? And if this is the case, how come nobody got a 100% on the test before? How was this allowed? Are these tests graded? If so, how are people supposed to get a 100 for the class? So many kids could have gotten a GPA of 4.0 to get into the greatest colleges in the world but can’t because this teacher just didn’t think things through. Now, this paragraph is already longer than the previous one by a few lines and we’re not even a tenth through it yet, so I would like to move through my frustration at that teacher right now. Moving on, we now have Hawthorne House. It’s a huge house that, according to Jameson who’s one of the grandons, regularly has a construction crew in it that he never encounters without trying to evade them. At the end of the book, there are these objects that have a poem scribbled onto them. You were supposed to read the poem and try to follow its instructions to get to the next step in the game. These were found in locations where there were 10 and 18 of something because Emily died on 10/18. These, however, were only found at the end of the book. You didn’t have to do anything to actually access these parts of the house where there were 10 and 18 of something. You could literally skip pretty much the entire game if you were to just find one of the objects, because please keep in mind that you only need 1 in order to progress. What was the point of the game if Tobias made it that easy to just skip all of it? Wait, actually, speaking of humongous skips in the puzzle, let me do myself one better. What if I told you that Avery and the grandsons could literally have just gone straight to the 2nd to last part of the puzzle in a way that’s perfectly reasonable? At the very end of the book, the last part of the game involves a secret basement that nobody knew about until they got this far into the game. But the floorboard covering the staircase was loose and was in the one part of the house everyone was at for the reading of the will. So surely someone could have just accidentally stepped on the loose floorboard and the grandsons could have just pried open the board in order to just get right to the end? They all knew their grandfather and loose floorboards were used in puzzles in the game before, so surely it's perfectly reasonable to assume that this is no exception, right? While this skip is a bit more of a stretch than the last one since it does rely on unknown and incalculable probabilities, why did Tobias go through all this effort to make this whole thing when they literally could have gone straight to the end without even meaning to? If they stepped on the floorboard, this book could have been 50 pages long at maximum. If they didn’t but went for the more obvious strategy of accidentally stumbling upon an object, then the book could have been 60 pages long at maximum. But in the parts of the game that could have been shaved off, there are things that just don’t make sense in any way, shape, or form. The first thing that’s nonsensical is that there’s an entire wing of the house that’s just locked off. There is no reason for it to be locked off, as its purpose was to be the play area for the grandsons when they were younger. What kind of health and safety hazard was within it? They explore it a bit and find that there is none, but there is the next clue in a desk that was sealed off from the rest of the house for whatever reason. Speaking of, when Avery asked Oren about Davenports, a type of desk, within Hawthorne House, he started taking her to libraries in the house. Now, surely there are other rooms in the house that have desks, right? Offices, bedrooms, maybe attics and basements, and that’s only off the top of my head. How did Oren know that the Davenport was in a library? In fact, how did he know that it wasn’t in the law offices that Avery’s lawyers work at? And the next and last thing that doesn’t make sense is that there’s a distinct lack of direction everywhere you go in this house. There’s a part about the first puzzle of the game that’s coming up in a page or so. Also, where exactly do the characters go to find the Davenport? And where do they go in the West Brook? Is there even anything to see in the Black Woods? Those were things I just had to vent about for a bit, back to our regularly scheduled program. If the grandsons didn’t go for the huge skips that go straight for the end of the book, they could have made a number of skips throughout that would still have cut down on the number of pages this book would’ve had. For example, when the first 2 or 3 numbers that would be necessary for the passcode were revealed, or maybe even 1 of one of the grandsons were smart enough, they could have just remembered about the day Emily died. In fact, I deem it impressive that they didn’t. Given how large an impact that moment made on their lives and how heavily those numbers were pushed onto them throughout it, they should instantly be able to recognize what the numbers mean, cutting down at least 50 pages from the book, making the total amount of pages in the book anywhere between 322 and 122, depending on what and which numbers they skipped. Also, in the beginning of the game, the very first puzzle is to search for a book that doesn’t match its cover. Before we cover the actual skip, we need to discuss just how poorly designed this part was assuming there wasn’t anything the group didn’t skip by accident. Hawthorne House has five libraries in total, each of them hosting a lot of books. Given how Avery, Jameson, and sometimes Grayson all spent hours at a time on multiple sessions searching for the one book, it can be assumed that there are probably over 1,000 books in the house, possibly 1,000 per library if we had known some unknown and incalculable variables such as the rate of how quickly everyone checked the books, exactly how long each session was, etc. etc. There is no further guidance on what to find other than a book that doesn’t match its cover. It is entirely possible that everyone could have spent a minimum of a month searching for the one book and still not know where it is. Have you ever searched for something for so long that you eventually forget what you were looking for? The only two people who were even playing the game at the start were Avery and Jameson. It would take a week at least with all 4 of the grandsons and Avery playing, so imagine just how long it could potentially take with only Avery, Jameson, and occasionally Grayson. I would imagine that if we maintained the work team that the book put together, which you should know at this point, and we made the correct book the very last book they picked, it would add… Actually, if I’m being perfectly honest, I think that it would only really add half a page at absolute maximum. I bet that every author with at least 1 published book in the world, regardless of how good or bad, can understand how boring just reading about a few people pulling out books and putting that back in for an extended amount of time can be. Now, onto how many pages having the perfect luck for this part would skip. If I’m being honest, I think it would skip out on 5-7 pages because they genuinely work at it for about that long. Honestly, I wish the author just put Avery and Jameson to work and just instantly cut to the part where they find a book. There’s nothing that important in the part where they just pull out book after book, so we can just do away with all of it. And for the last skip that comes to mind, it’s actually at the 2nd to last part that the group could have cut to by prying the floorboard early. Xavier can skip the 2nd to last part. When the group finally discovers the basement, it was only Avery and Xavier who actually found it. At the end of the basement, there is a puzzle that requires the handprints of the 4 Hawthorne grandsons. Now, earlier in the book, Xavier is found missing an eyebrow because a robot that he made exploded into his face. I mention this because this verifies that Xavier has a good understanding of how technology like handprints works. So Xavier could have skipped having to get the other 3 grandsons together, especially considering that Jameson stormed out of the puzzle when it was revealed that the game revolved around the date 10/18, just by getting whatever he uses to program robots to reconfigure the handprints into being flagged as having been pressed. This would have saved 3-5 pages of the book. To summarize the potential time saves in this book, here’s a table showing how many pages that we could have had if the characters found skips and what skips they found.


Skips used | Pages in the hypothetical book

The skip that goes straight to the basement |45-47 max.

and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that goes straight to the |50 max.

basement | ㅤ

|

The skip that uses the objects’ poor hiding |55-57 max.

spots and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that uses the objects |60 max. ㅤ

|

The skip where a Hawthorne recognizes |117-319

the date early on and the 2nd to last puzzle|

skip | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |110-314 ㅤ

|

Only the skip where a Hawthorne |122-322

recognizes the date early on | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |115-317 ㅤ


Now, you might be wondering why I even bothered looking at time saves in this essay when it seems so outrageously out of place that you could mistake it for a guide on speedrunning a video game. You see, there’s a reason why these skips are in this book, and it’s for one reason and one reason only. The setting and the story behind it was simply poorly designed. Imagine if the real life golden owl hunt was this easy to solve. The guy who made the whole puzzle had to think of witty clues that are difficult but reasonable to solve, he had to actually select a location, he had to do so much for this singular statue of an owl. Now imagine if a bunch of teens skipped the whole game because they saw a gold glitter that was bright enough that it could blind people if they looked straight at it in the dirt. That’s pretty much how this book is, except the teens don’t notice the gold glitter until they see a bunch of people with their copies of “On the Trail of the Golden Owl” pointing at it and then suddenly they see it and somehow muscle everyone away for the treasure to be theirs. This is just a badly designed game set up by a badly designed setting. Everything would have been so much better if the clues were better hidden and if the kids had a better sense of what they were doing, which is also a fault of the setting because everything in the setting was set up by Tobias, who didn’t give them enough to reasonably win the game. Authors should remember that settings are the most important parts of the book. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the setting, such as it containing obvious clues that no person would miss even if they were blind and deaf that the characters somehow just don’t quite catch onto, then that flaw leaks into the rest of the book, ruining the immersive experience in ways that are just impossible to comprehend until you read the book for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll have characters who simultaneously think that the sun isn’t as big as it is because there’s dark in space and solve a Rubik’s cube with their hands tied behind their back while underwater while playing themselves into a winning position against a chess grandmaster while watching Rick and Morty on top of all of that. It’s actually crazy how much a good setting is necessary for a good book and how badly a poorly-done setting can negatively affect the overall experience someone can get by reading the book. A good example of the former, a good setting, is Harry Potter. The series didn’t take place in a normal campus or a regular old castle, no, it took place in a magic castle which was, in a sense, a character in of itself. Imagine how different the book would be if the staircases didn’t move all over the place or if there wasn’t a hut with a man named Hagrid who could probably be a pro wrestler but instead decided to teach children about magic stuff residing in it on campus. Now of course, fantasy is very different from mystery, so how about we get another good setting from the mystery genre? Now, what if I told you that the board game Clue had a better setting than the book? Clue takes place in a mansion and your goal is to find out which character killed an unnamed victim. The mansion has nine rooms the players explore, and each room is perfectly reasonable for a mansion to have. They are, in order, a kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, a hall, a study, a library, a billiard room, a conservatory, a ballroom, and an inaccessible cellar that contains the answers to the murder. When a player moves to the room, they have to make a suggestion as to who did the crime, where they did it, and what weapon they used. The tokens containing everything the person mentioned are moved into the room. If the player calls out something the player to their left has in their hand in the form of cards, the player to the left shows one of the called-out things to the turn player. Also, other players have to disprove the suggestion if they can. This makes it so as the game progresses, the players find out more and more about the murder and there are no inconsistencies in what a person knows or should know, and you don’t have someone suddenly noticing something that should have been noticed way before, such as the objects scattered around Hawthorne House that were only noticed way into the game when they were sitting in plain sight in pretty much every room of the house. Now, why is it that the setting of Clue, a board game that’s not supposed to have such a good setting, is so much better than the setting of something that’s supposed to have a really nice setting? It’s because of how much information each setting gives off. You should know the abundance of info Hawthorne House gives early that allows the players to skip straight to the end of the book if they were attentive enough, while the setting in Clue doesn’t allow for any form of progression skips, making it much more immersive than the book, which is supposed to be super immersive. And to finally finish off the final part of this essay, I shall now explain one last reason why the setting in The Inheritance Games isn’t a good setting. It’s because of the sheer overcomplexity and anti-sensibility of everything. This house has rooms upon rooms and none of them are necessary in the slightest. I would assume that the purpose of a solarium, a room with a glass dome, would be to have plants grow indoors, no? Well, the solarium in Hawthorne House just has the room for no apparent reason. It’s literally just there. Avery didn’t know what a solarium was before visiting, and there were no plants in it. If you wanted to sunbathe, you could just go outside and do it. Another weird room is the movie theater. Surely this house that has a room per starving person Tobias could have fed if he was willing to give back to his community has 1 or more living room(s)? Why don’t they just watch TV in those places because a house this size should have more than 1 living room instead of making everyone go on a thousand-year odyssey just to see Morbius? Also, do you remember the basement from the skips? How was that allowed? There’s no way that anything about it was OSHA-approved. A staircase that makes you go down two stairs at a time that also has no railings? There are amazingly large mortality risks from that. A huge basement with only 1 exit? If a fire starts down there, well, let’s hope they were all near the exit. And there is absolutely no way that they would let a basement with no form of constant restoration slide. If the ceiling breaks, half the house is going to just slide off. And the reason why I bring up these logic and OSHA violations is that this book takes place in the real world. The author is writing human characters that have human needs and laws they have to follow. And these rooms break everything in terms of both convenience and law. The book takes place in Texas, but if OSHA lets that cellar slide, then it might as well take place in Narnia. Now, just because books take place in the real world doesn’t mean that the characters have to follow the laws. But this is a building that was legally required to be approved by OSHA before being built. So how and why, may I ask, does it exist? That’s not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know. To summarize the section that takes up about half of the essay, the setting, there are skips the characters could have done to turn this 372-page novel into a 45-page novella, the setting was set up to make the characters look as if they aren’t the brightest bulb on the chandelier, and nothing about the setting makes logical or legal sense.

To summarize this essay, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg.

For this summer, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg. Here’s why I strongly disliked my choice.

Let’s look at the protagonist, Avery. She feels like a generic character that’s only important because the plot made her inherent billions. She doesn’t really do anything with her money, even though she was, at one point in the book, thinking about all the good she could do with her newfound fortune. It’s a really underdeveloped idea and was only really brought up in that one scene. She had an entire law office to herself, so if she really wanted to, she could have consulted her lawyers about stuff she could do that would help around the local community or something. She doesn’t, and while it seems boring on paper, there could be something about, say, a sudden influx of murders and robberies, and she could make vigilante robots to take the evildoers down or something to that effect. The fact that Avery doesn’t even do something with her money makes it seem like she’s a screwdriver; she only actually needs to be there in the most specific scenarios that only ever happen in this book. In some parts of the book, there were parts where I thought that I was supposed to project myself onto Avery, but what’s happening to her is such an out-there situation that I find it really hard to relate. In terms of character development, she doesn’t really learn anything from the start of the book to the end. Really, I was curious as to how she would grow as a person from this experience from the beginning, and the answer to that question was that she wouldn’t. Something I strongly disliked about the book was that the first solution that came to Avery’s head was always the correct one, which detracts from the book as a whole because if every one of her guesses is the right one, how can she grow from making mistakes? Honestly the way Avery was written set her character up to fail. Also, in the first half of the house, she occasionally gives advice on chess. Disregard all of it. As someone who competitively plays chess every once in a while and even has an official rating with the USCF (albeit it’s in the 500s, which isn’t too good), all of the advice is complete gibberish. To summarize about our protagonist, she doesn’t feel like a person, more like a plot device that gives bad chess advice.

So if you couldn’t already tell, I dislike the main character and how she was written, so what about the antagonist? Avery’s sister named Libby’s abusive boyfriend named Drake acts as the antagonist for this book. He’s a terrible person, he’s a physical abuser and tried to kill Avery twice, but really, he’s not that interesting. The only thing different setting him apart from comic books from the 50s or 60s is the realism of what he does. While those villains were out there doing dumb things to dominate the world, he was doing things real abusers do. But in the end, both the comic book villains and Drake seem to only do what they do for 1 reason and 1 reason only; they can. There was never a point in the book where even the slightest hint of a motive was revealed. Similarly to Avery, he never grew as a character throughout the book and the only resolution we got from him is that he was sent to prison, which, given everything we’ve seen him do, is the most realistic outcome, but certainly not the most satisfying. Honestly, Grayson, one of Tobias Hawthornes’ grandsons, would have made a better villain. Tobias is the billionaire who left everything to Avery. Grayson’s entire family, who he loves dearly, was just disinherited to this seemingly random girl who, without any further context, seemed to have somehow manipulated his old, decaying grandpa. He was left with nothing by his own grandfather, and he will do anything to reclaim his family’s name from the girl behind the world’s largest exploitation of the vulnerable. I would love to see a version of the book where Libby is single and the main antagonist is Grayson. Just ditch Drake, he’s pretty much there to enhance the drama. But later on, it’s revealed that Skye Laughlin, the Hawthorne grandsons’ mother, helped Drake in his first attempt at Avery’s life. I mean, there was technically a hint to this, the hint being when she cheekily said that she made it her duty to befriend everyone who disinherits her family, but when she says that in that point of the book, there is no former direction for the reader to know what to make of it. Something as subtle as a mention of the pronunciation “dr” coming from a room Avery walked by would be cool, but instead, it seems as if the author thought that something unexpected happening with no proper build up beforehand would make a good twist. If I were the author, I would make the gunman Rachael, a cousin of the Hawthorne grandsons, because she was the one with the most proper buildup for the reveal moment due to her lack of alibi and she’s the child of Zara and Constantine, two people who are also apart of the Hawthorne family and strongly despise Rachael due to obvious reasons. Zara and Constantine could have somehow talked her into opening fire like some sort of necessary evil thing. Nobody would have wanted to do it, but to them, they would have to in order to reclaim the Hawthorne name. To summarize, the antagonists are either one-dimensional, not used to their full potential, or have the oddest reveals in the history of literature.

Alright. The characters don’t seem to be very well written. Surely the conflict will step up in quality, right? Well, to tell you the truth, the conflict was the second hardest thing to write about in this essay. Not because it’s a really powerful aspect of the book and I can’t say it in words without disrespecting it or something, but because of the difficulty of finding the conflict. Perhaps the closest to conflict I have is Drake versus Avery and Libby. To be honest, it was a snooze fest of a conflict. The amount of times Drake is brought up because of something he did is less than 10 times. He has done exactly 6 malicious deeds, which are being an abusive boyfriend 3 times over, defamation of Avery, shooting up Avery and Jameson, and attempting to kill Avery, Alisa who’s one of Avery’s lawyers, and Oren who’s Avery’s main bodyguard. Compare this to any other villain you know, like Voldemort. Think about everything he’s done that gave him the title of he-who-shall-not-be-named. And then we have Drake, who’s most certainly the poster boy of realistic and boring villains. This is a book where a billionaire leaves everything to a random teenager whom he had a singular conversation with, and that conversation was 2 sentences long. And that billionaire hosted a whole scavenger hunt to explain everything about that decision. I’m not here for realism. I’m here for excitement, adventure, anything except realism. And yet the author completely ditches the entire nature of her book to a villain that brings up the least interesting, most forced-into-your-throat conflicts I have ever seen. These conflicts are the melatonin of conflicts. There is practically nothing in the precise 6 times he did anything wrong that does anything but enhance the drama. There is no reason for these conflicts to be in the book if they don’t have a larger meaning to them, such as increasing the frequency and intensity of his deeds and, this might be kind of far-fetched, but just maybe he should have any reason at all to do what he does give this book a memorable villain that will stick with the reader for ages. To summarize, the conflict in this book is the boring part, and while it may not be intentional, it makes me want to go to sleep.

I’m starting to think this may not be a very good book, but surely there’s some sort of overarching theme about the story, right? Well, do you remember how I said that the conflict was only the 2nd hardest part of the book to write about? This part was the hardest for the same reason the conflict was hard to write about. The main difference is that the conflict was possible to be found in a week when reading the book blind with no outside help. That’s right, it took me a full week to find anything resembling a theme. Do you want to hear the one theme I spent an entire 7 days trying to figure out? It’s letting go. Throughout the portion of the book where we know the day and month when Emily, another cousin of the Hawthornes, died, we’re reminded about something Avery’s mom said before her death. She said that she had a secret about Avery’s date of birth. Avery was born on the same day and month Emily died. Throughout that entire part, the reader is led to believe that Avery’s mom somehow knew Tobias Hawthorne and that the connection between Avery’s birth and Emily’s death wasn’t a coincidence. However, when we get to the end of the book, Avery and the grandsons open a box with 5 letters, one for each person. There are no more clues to something greater that the gang is left with, and what they were given was the end of the line. At this point, both the reader and Avery are led to believe that it really was just a coincidence, that what her mom was thinking of was completely different and that Tobias selected Avery because she was a random girl that had a coincidental yet ominously reminiscent birthday that had a funny little name, as Avery’s full name is Avery Kylie Grambs, an anagram for A Very Risky Gamble. What Tobias left her was a packet of sugar which is probably no longer FDA approved because one time, Avery was stacking sugar packets at a diner and her mom used her full name when talking to her about it. Tobias was, for whatever reason, in the room when this was happening and asked Avery if she could spell her full name. She did. Coming back to the present, there seems to be no other way Tobias could have known Avery, so the only possible conclusion is that he used Avery as a tool to bring the grandsons together for one final puzzle. There was nothing her mother had to do with the Hawthorne story and there’s something else she was talking about. Additionally, the fact that there were seemingly no more clues to be found proves that the one time at the diner was the reason why Avery was selected and that was simply the truth, albeit a hard one. At the end of the day, she couldn’t hold on to something her mom said years ago or a game that was already completed and she just had to forget about both. That’s right, it took me a week to come up with a glorified logical fallacy that had to have been the theme of the book because nothing else was filling the seat in. I have searched this book far and wide and there cannot be another thing adjacent to a theme. I say that what has to be the theme of the book is a logical fallacy because even though what Avery’s mom was talking about had nothing to do with the Hawthornes, she was still talking about a secret that hasn’t been discovered yet. And with Avery’s newfound resources, surely she could have sent a lawyer to research what happened on the day she was born? If she cared that much, she should have acted on it. And how does she know there weren’t any other hints in what Tobias gave the Hawthorne grandsons? There is no reason for her to have simply forgotten about it the way she did, and it infuriates me to no end, similarly to anything about this book in general. To summarize, the theme is letting go, even if it was portrayed in such an odd way that detracts from the theme.

Alright. I don’t know what to say about this book anymore. What about the narrator’s point of view? The book is written in first person and it never switches characters. That’s okay, but sometimes in this book I feel like it should switch over to Libby or one of the grandsons. Avery’s narration gets pretty boring, but in this book, being bored is like brushing your teeth, it’s normal. To be honest, the reason why I’m saying that the POV is the best part of the book is because it’s not infuriating on any extreme, just uninteresting. There’s nothing special to note about it because it’s not special in any way. It’s just inoffensive. And it is for this reason that this paragraph is by far the shortest paragraph in this essay. To summarize, the narrator’s POV isn’t interesting and is pretty bland.

Alright, we are now down to the last part of this essay, the setting of the book. This is also the longest part of the essay due to a number of reasons. The setting at the beginning of the book is Avery’s high school. The book starts off with Avery solving a test that was deliberately made impossible by the teacher that assigned it. But here’s the thing: that test was never brought up again. So why exactly was it in the book? I don’t know. There’s so much buildup around the test in the first part of the book only for it to be diminished immediately. Also, if it was made to be impossible, why exactly is it that she was able to get a 100% on it just by studying? And if this is the case, how come nobody got a 100% on the test before? How was this allowed? Are these tests graded? If so, how are people supposed to get a 100 for the class? So many kids could have gotten a GPA of 4.0 to get into the greatest colleges in the world but can’t because this teacher just didn’t think things through. Now, this paragraph is already longer than the previous one by a few lines and we’re not even a tenth through it yet, so I would like to move through my frustration at that teacher right now. Moving on, we now have Hawthorne House. It’s a huge house that, according to Jameson who’s one of the grandons, regularly has a construction crew in it that he never encounters without trying to evade them. At the end of the book, there are these objects that have a poem scribbled onto them. You were supposed to read the poem and try to follow its instructions to get to the next step in the game. These were found in locations where there were 10 and 18 of something because Emily died on 10/18. These, however, were only found at the end of the book. You didn’t have to do anything to actually access these parts of the house where there were 10 and 18 of something. You could literally skip pretty much the entire game if you were to just find one of the objects, because please keep in mind that you only need 1 in order to progress. What was the point of the game if Tobias made it that easy to just skip all of it? Wait, actually, speaking of humongous skips in the puzzle, let me do myself one better. What if I told you that Avery and the grandsons could literally have just gone straight to the 2nd to last part of the puzzle in a way that’s perfectly reasonable? At the very end of the book, the last part of the game involves a secret basement that nobody knew about until they got this far into the game. But the floorboard covering the staircase was loose and was in the one part of the house everyone was at for the reading of the will. So surely someone could have just accidentally stepped on the loose floorboard and the grandsons could have just pried open the board in order to just get right to the end? They all knew their grandfather and loose floorboards were used in puzzles in the game before, so surely it's perfectly reasonable to assume that this is no exception, right? While this skip is a bit more of a stretch than the last one since it does rely on unknown and incalculable probabilities, why did Tobias go through all this effort to make this whole thing when they literally could have gone straight to the end without even meaning to? If they stepped on the floorboard, this book could have been 50 pages long at maximum. If they didn’t but went for the more obvious strategy of accidentally stumbling upon an object, then the book could have been 60 pages long at maximum. But in the parts of the game that could have been shaved off, there are things that just don’t make sense in any way, shape, or form. The first thing that’s nonsensical is that there’s an entire wing of the house that’s just locked off. There is no reason for it to be locked off, as its purpose was to be the play area for the grandsons when they were younger. What kind of health and safety hazard was within it? They explore it a bit and find that there is none, but there is the next clue in a desk that was sealed off from the rest of the house for whatever reason. Speaking of, when Avery asked Oren about Davenports, a type of desk, within Hawthorne House, he started taking her to libraries in the house. Now, surely there are other rooms in the house that have desks, right? Offices, bedrooms, maybe attics and basements, and that’s only off the top of my head. How did Oren know that the Davenport was in a library? In fact, how did he know that it wasn’t in the law offices that Avery’s lawyers work at? And the next and last thing that doesn’t make sense is that there’s a distinct lack of direction everywhere you go in this house. There’s a part about the first puzzle of the game that’s coming up in a page or so. Also, where exactly do the characters go to find the Davenport? And where do they go in the West Brook? Is there even anything to see in the Black Woods? Those were things I just had to vent about for a bit, back to our regularly scheduled program. If the grandsons didn’t go for the huge skips that go straight for the end of the book, they could have made a number of skips throughout that would still have cut down on the number of pages this book would’ve had. For example, when the first 2 or 3 numbers that would be necessary for the passcode were revealed, or maybe even 1 of one of the grandsons were smart enough, they could have just remembered about the day Emily died. In fact, I deem it impressive that they didn’t. Given how large an impact that moment made on their lives and how heavily those numbers were pushed onto them throughout it, they should instantly be able to recognize what the numbers mean, cutting down at least 50 pages from the book, making the total amount of pages in the book anywhere between 322 and 122, depending on what and which numbers they skipped. Also, in the beginning of the game, the very first puzzle is to search for a book that doesn’t match its cover. Before we cover the actual skip, we need to discuss just how poorly designed this part was assuming there wasn’t anything the group didn’t skip by accident. Hawthorne House has five libraries in total, each of them hosting a lot of books. Given how Avery, Jameson, and sometimes Grayson all spent hours at a time on multiple sessions searching for the one book, it can be assumed that there are probably over 1,000 books in the house, possibly 1,000 per library if we had known some unknown and incalculable variables such as the rate of how quickly everyone checked the books, exactly how long each session was, etc. etc. There is no further guidance on what to find other than a book that doesn’t match its cover. It is entirely possible that everyone could have spent a minimum of a month searching for the one book and still not know where it is. Have you ever searched for something for so long that you eventually forget what you were looking for? The only two people who were even playing the game at the start were Avery and Jameson. It would take a week at least with all 4 of the grandsons and Avery playing, so imagine just how long it could potentially take with only Avery, Jameson, and occasionally Grayson. I would imagine that if we maintained the work team that the book put together, which you should know at this point, and we made the correct book the very last book they picked, it would add… Actually, if I’m being perfectly honest, I think that it would only really add half a page at absolute maximum. I bet that every author with at least 1 published book in the world, regardless of how good or bad, can understand how boring just reading about a few people pulling out books and putting that back in for an extended amount of time can be. Now, onto how many pages having the perfect luck for this part would skip. If I’m being honest, I think it would skip out on 5-7 pages because they genuinely work at it for about that long. Honestly, I wish the author just put Avery and Jameson to work and just instantly cut to the part where they find a book. There’s nothing that important in the part where they just pull out book after book, so we can just do away with all of it. And for the last skip that comes to mind, it’s actually at the 2nd to last part that the group could have cut to by prying the floorboard early. Xavier can skip the 2nd to last part. When the group finally discovers the basement, it was only Avery and Xavier who actually found it. At the end of the basement, there is a puzzle that requires the handprints of the 4 Hawthorne grandsons. Now, earlier in the book, Xavier is found missing an eyebrow because a robot that he made exploded into his face. I mention this because this verifies that Xavier has a good understanding of how technology like handprints works. So Xavier could have skipped having to get the other 3 grandsons together, especially considering that Jameson stormed out of the puzzle when it was revealed that the game revolved around the date 10/18, just by getting whatever he uses to program robots to reconfigure the handprints into being flagged as having been pressed. This would have saved 3-5 pages of the book. To summarize the potential time saves in this book, here’s a table showing how many pages that we could have had if the characters found skips and what skips they found.


Skips used | Pages in the hypothetical book

The skip that goes straight to the basement |45-47 max.

and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that goes straight to the |50 max.

basement | ㅤ

|

The skip that uses the objects’ poor hiding |55-57 max.

spots and the 2nd to last puzzle skip | ㅤ

|

Only the skip that uses the objects |60 max. ㅤ

|

The skip where a Hawthorne recognizes |117-319

the date early on and the 2nd to last puzzle|

skip | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |110-314 ㅤ

|

Only the skip where a Hawthorne |122-322

recognizes the date early on | ㅤ

|

The above and perfect book luck |115-317 ㅤ


Now, you might be wondering why I even bothered looking at time saves in this essay when it seems so outrageously out of place that you could mistake it for a guide on speedrunning a video game. You see, there’s a reason why these skips are in this book, and it’s for one reason and one reason only. The setting and the story behind it was simply poorly designed. Imagine if the real life golden owl hunt was this easy to solve. The guy who made the whole puzzle had to think of witty clues that are difficult but reasonable to solve, he had to actually select a location, he had to do so much for this singular statue of an owl. Now imagine if a bunch of teens skipped the whole game because they saw a gold glitter that was bright enough that it could blind people if they looked straight at it in the dirt. That’s pretty much how this book is, except the teens don’t notice the gold glitter until they see a bunch of people with their copies of “On the Trail of the Golden Owl” pointing at it and then suddenly they see it and somehow muscle everyone away for the treasure to be theirs. This is just a badly designed game set up by a badly designed setting. Everything would have been so much better if the clues were better hidden and if the kids had a better sense of what they were doing, which is also a fault of the setting because everything in the setting was set up by Tobias, who didn’t give them enough to reasonably win the game. Authors should remember that settings are the most important parts of the book. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the setting, such as it containing obvious clues that no person would miss even if they were blind and deaf that the characters somehow just don’t quite catch onto, then that flaw leaks into the rest of the book, ruining the immersive experience in ways that are just impossible to comprehend until you read the book for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll have characters who simultaneously think that the sun isn’t as big as it is because there’s dark in space and solve a Rubik’s cube with their hands tied behind their back while underwater while playing themselves into a winning position against a chess grandmaster while watching Rick and Morty on top of all of that. It’s actually crazy how much a good setting is necessary for a good book and how badly a poorly-done setting can negatively affect the overall experience someone can get by reading the book. A good example of the former, a good setting, is Harry Potter. The series didn’t take place in a normal campus or a regular old castle, no, it took place in a magic castle which was, in a sense, a character in of itself. Imagine how different the book would be if the staircases didn’t move all over the place or if there wasn’t a hut with a man named Hagrid who could probably be a pro wrestler but instead decided to teach children about magic stuff residing in it on campus. Now of course, fantasy is very different from mystery, so how about we get another good setting from the mystery genre? Now, what if I told you that the board game Clue had a better setting than the book? Clue takes place in a mansion and your goal is to find out which character killed an unnamed victim. The mansion has nine rooms the players explore, and each room is perfectly reasonable for a mansion to have. They are, in order, a kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, a hall, a study, a library, a billiard room, a conservatory, a ballroom, and an inaccessible cellar that contains the answers to the murder. When a player moves to the room, they have to make a suggestion as to who did the crime, where they did it, and what weapon they used. The tokens containing everything the person mentioned are moved into the room. If the player calls out something the player to their left has in their hand in the form of cards, the player to the left shows one of the called-out things to the turn player. Also, other players have to disprove the suggestion if they can. This makes it so as the game progresses, the players find out more and more about the murder and there are no inconsistencies in what a person knows or should know, and you don’t have someone suddenly noticing something that should have been noticed way before, such as the objects scattered around Hawthorne House that were only noticed way into the game when they were sitting in plain sight in pretty much every room of the house. Now, why is it that the setting of Clue, a board game that’s not supposed to have such a good setting, is so much better than the setting of something that’s supposed to have a really nice setting? It’s because of how much information each setting gives off. You should know the abundance of info Hawthorne House gives early that allows the players to skip straight to the end of the book if they were attentive enough, while the setting in Clue doesn’t allow for any form of progression skips, making it much more immersive than the book, which is supposed to be super immersive. And to finally finish off the final part of this essay, I shall now explain one last reason why the setting in The Inheritance Games isn’t a good setting. It’s because of the sheer overcomplexity and anti-sensibility of everything. This house has rooms upon rooms and none of them are necessary in the slightest. I would assume that the purpose of a solarium, a room with a glass dome, would be to have plants grow indoors, no? Well, the solarium in Hawthorne House just has the room for no apparent reason. It’s literally just there. Avery didn’t know what a solarium was before visiting, and there were no plants in it. If you wanted to sunbathe, you could just go outside and do it. Another weird room is the movie theater. Surely this house that has a room per starving person Tobias could have fed if he was willing to give back to his community has 1 or more living room(s)? Why don’t they just watch TV in those places because a house this size should have more than 1 living room instead of making everyone go on a thousand-year odyssey just to see Morbius? Also, do you remember the basement from the skips? How was that allowed? There’s no way that anything about it was OSHA-approved. A staircase that makes you go down two stairs at a time that also has no railings? There are amazingly large mortality risks from that. A huge basement with only 1 exit? If a fire starts down there, well, let’s hope they were all near the exit. And there is absolutely no way that they would let a basement with no form of constant restoration slide. If the ceiling breaks, half the house is going to just slide off. And the reason why I bring up these logic and OSHA violations is that this book takes place in the real world. The author is writing human characters that have human needs and laws they have to follow. And these rooms break everything in terms of both convenience and law. The book takes place in Texas, but if OSHA lets that cellar slide, then it might as well take place in Narnia. Now, just because books take place in the real world doesn’t mean that the characters have to follow the laws. But this is a building that was legally required to be approved by OSHA before being built. So how and why, may I ask, does it exist? That’s not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know. To summarize the section that takes up about half of the essay, the setting, there are skips the characters could have done to turn this 372-page novel into a 45-page novella, the setting was set up to make the characters look as if they aren’t the brightest bulb on the chandelier, and nothing about the setting makes logical or legal sense.

To summarize this essay, I was given the task of reading a book from a selection of 6 books. Of those 6 books, one of the options was “The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which I eventually picked. After reading, I sincerely wish that I went with my 2nd option, “All the Broken Pieces” by Ann E. Burg.

no way u actually read the thing

Yeah

yeah, pretty much

Read holes by Louis Sachar It’s worth it

Who hasn’t read that book?

I’m reading “Miles Morales” by Jason Reynolds

i havent...

Well yeah read it. It’s considered a classic. It also has a movie so yeah

ill consider it

Lost my attention span