YA Book Reviews: The Inheritance Games, The Stolen Kingdom, The Ivies
We review three action-packed YA novels: The Inheritance Games, The Stolen Kingdom, and The Ivies.
The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
Several people recommended The Inheritance Games to me, and I totally see why: It’s a fun, fast-paced read full of puzzles and surprises. Is it the best book I ever read? No. Did it make the perfect poolside reading pleasure? Totally.
Avery has no idea why she’s named in the will of billionaire Tobias Hawthorne — or why her inheritance depends on her making his enormous Texas estate her home for one year. (This is complicated by the fact that Hawthorne’s family, who have been disinherited by the same will, will be living in the house with Avery.)
Still, after being broke since her mom died a few years ago, Avery is up for the challenge. This inheritance could be her ticket to college and a life where she doesn’t have to wait tables to keep the lights on. But it quickly becomes obvious that Tobias Hawthorne is up to something, and his will is just the beginning of a long game. With help and hinderance from Hawthorne’s four grandsons, the media stalking her every move, and an estate full of secrets, Avery is going to have do some quick thinking and careful strategizing to figure out why a wealthy stranger made her his heir and what secret the Hawthorne estate is hiding. Luckily, Hawthorne picked the right girl for the job. Avery was born for this challenge.
There’s a big mysterious house full of hidden passages and secret codes. There’s a complicated family that is full of people who are Up To Something. There are Mysteries From the Past coming to light in the present. And there’s a reasonably satisfying conclusion. I’ll forgive it the love triangle and occasional plot hole for the sheer fun it was to read. This is a perfect summer book.
The Stolen Kingdom by Jillian Boehme
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
The Stolen Kingdom has a lot going on, and that may have been its downfall. The action happens from two perspectives: Maralyth, a winemaker’s daughter, discovers that she has magical powers and a claim to the throne of the kingdom; and Alac, the kingdom’s spare heir, is beginning to suspect that his father’s rule may be based on some shady sorcery. When their paths cross in an attempted coup, political and romantic sparks fly.
I love a stand-alone fantasy — you all know how I feel about cliffhanger endings! — but this one may have tried to do too much. The seeds of this book are good: There’s a complicated political/magical system, and I learned a lot about winemaking, which was cool (if possibly off-topic?). I think this wanted to be a feminist fantasy, but it fell into so many misogynist fantasy tropes: Maralyth is different from all those other girls, you guys, the ones who are happy to just get married and have babies. (Because of course they have so many choices about their lives in this fantasy world.) She is Special. She is so Special that the moment Alac sees her, he falls in insta-love and sees everything in his world in a whole new way. (Their “romance” is the second-flattest part of the book; the flattest is Maralyth’s relationship with her brother.) This is a real peeve of mine in fantasy literature, the One Special Girl trope, and so I know that people without this peeve might see the book very differently. If there had been a strong sense of world building, if there had been interesting political relationships, if the magic system had been developed, if the characters had more depth — maybe if any of these things had been the case, I could have gotten over my bias, but they didn’t, and I couldn’t. I didn't love this one.
The Ivies by Alexa Donne
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
The Ivies has so many things I love: Boarding school hijinks! Academic rivalries! Murder and mayhem! So it’s fair to say that I was prepared to be obsessed with this book — and that I was a little bummed that it didn’t quite live up to its promise.
First, the good: At super-competitive Claflin Academy, the Ivies are the ultra-elite, the five girls who have their Ivy League futures mapped out for them. Scholarship student Olivia knows she’s lucky to be included in this hotshot group — and she knows she's risking her luck when she applies early admission to Harvard, which is queen bee Avery’s exclusive domain. Avery doesn’t get in, Olivia does — and so does fellow Ivy Emma, who also went behind Avery’s back to apply. When Emma turns up dead, everyone’s a suspect and all kinds of hidden secrets are revealed.
It’s a good set-up! But the bad part is that it doesn’t quite work. Olivia herself is a big problem: A lot happens around her, but she never becomes a fully realized character, and the more the plot hinges on her, the more obvious that flatness becomes. The plot is full of twists and turns, but they feel predictable — though once you’ve read a bunch of YA thrillers, this is maybe inevitable, so it could be a Me Problem not a Book Problem. And the end — well, I didn’t like how things resolved, and I’m not sure what the ending says about all the different narrative threads the book was tugging along. It definitely seemed to contradict itself.
Still, boarding school murders are summer reading classics for a reason! I don’t think you’ll regret picking this one up if that’s your jam, but don’t expect any profundities or surprises.
(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)
Looking for a middle grades fantasy for your next homeschool readaloud? We review three of our newer faves: The Time of Green Magic, Amari and the Night Brothers, and The Language of Ghosts.