The Brothers Hawthorne — The Inheritance Games, Book 4

The Brothers Hawthorne Review

The Brothers Hawthorne is the fourth book in the Inheritance Games series and the first to depart substantially from Avery Grambs’s perspective. Instead, Barnes splits the narrative between Grayson and Jameson Hawthorne — the two most enigmatic of the Hawthorne brothers — and the result reveals why readers have been fascinated by them since the first book.

Grayson’s storyline is the more grounded: a conspiracy that reaches into the foundations of the Hawthorne empire, requiring him to operate in a world where his wealth and surname are liabilities rather than advantages. Jameson’s storyline leans into the series’ more fantastical puzzle-trail elements, with a globe-trotting adventure that plays to his impulsiveness and genius simultaneously.

What works: Barnes’s plotting remains airtight. The dual perspective finally gives both brothers the space to be protagonists rather than love interests and antagonists. The Hawthorne world’s mythology — the grandfather’s legacy, the games he designed — deepens considerably.

For series fans: The Brothers Hawthorne is not an entry point. Readers who have not completed the original trilogy will miss the significance of almost every character relationship. Begin with The Inheritance Games.

Verdict: A genuine expansion rather than a cash-in. Barnes had more story to tell in this world, and this book proves it.

Inheritance Games Reading Order

1. The Inheritance Games
2. The Hawthorne Legacy
3. The Final Gambit
4. The Brothers Hawthorne ← you are here

The Split Structure and What It Unlocks

The boldest decision Jennifer Lynn Barnes makes in The Brothers Hawthorne is to abandon the single-narrator intimacy that anchored the original trilogy. By alternating between Grayson and Jameson, she gains the ability to run two tonally distinct stories in parallel — and the contrast is the book’s engine. Grayson’s strand reads almost like a corporate-conspiracy thriller, dropping him into a setting where the Hawthorne name and fortune that once opened every door now mark him as a target; watching a character defined by control improvise without his usual leverage is the novel’s most rewarding inversion. Jameson’s strand, by contrast, leans into the high-concept puzzle-trail spectacle the series is known for, sending him on a globe-spanning, high-stakes gamble that indulges his recklessness. Some of those puzzle elements stretch plausibility, but they keep the book propulsive, and the alternation lets each brother illuminate what the other lacks.

Barnes, the Inheritance Games Phenomenon, and the Hawthorne Universe

Jennifer Lynn Barnes is not only a bestselling young-adult author but a psychologist whose academic interest in cognition and storytelling informs the elaborately engineered puzzles at the heart of her books. The Inheritance Games, launched in 2020, became a runaway TikTok and BookTok success — a billionaire’s death, a teenage heiress chosen for reasons unknown, and four brilliant, dangerous grandsons set to compete and collude in a mansion full of secret passages and riddles. The series sold in the millions and spawned this Hawthorne-centered continuation along with further volumes such as The Grandest Game, extending a universe Barnes clearly intends to keep building. The Brothers Hawthorne functions as both a reward for invested readers and a bridge: it deepens the mythology of the late Tobias Hawthorne, whose designed games continue to generate consequences long after his death, while opening new narrative ground the Avery-centered books could not reach.

How and When to Read It

This is emphatically a book for readers already inside the series. Newcomers will find nearly every relationship and revelation weightless without the groundwork of the first three volumes, so the correct starting point remains The Inheritance Games, followed by The Hawthorne Legacy and The Final Gambit. Fans who came to the series chiefly for Avery Grambs should know she recedes to the margins here; the trade-off is finally getting Grayson and Jameson as full protagonists rather than enigmatic love interests. Approached in sequence and on its own terms — as a confident expansion rather than a placeholder — The Brothers Hawthorne delivers exactly the propulsive, twisty pleasure that made the series a sensation, while proving Barnes still has genuine story left to tell in this world.

Why the Brothers Earn Their Own Book

The most persuasive case for The Brothers Hawthorne is character-driven. Throughout the original trilogy, Grayson and Jameson were defined largely by their relationships to Avery and to each other — the cold, dutiful heir and the reckless gambler, glimpsed from the outside. Giving each his own narrative reveals how much interior life Barnes had been holding in reserve. Grayson’s arc is, beneath the conspiracy plot, a study in a controlled young man learning the limits of control and confronting the cost of the role he was raised to play; Jameson’s is about the line between brilliance and self-destruction, and what it means to need a puzzle the way other people need air. The contrast Barnes draws between intelligence married to recklessness and intelligence married to discipline gives the dual structure a thematic spine rather than mere novelty. It is the kind of expansion that justifies itself by showing the reader something the original perspective structurally could not access, and it deepens the emotional stakes of the wider Hawthorne saga in the process. For devoted fans, that payoff is the heart of why this installment lands as more than a victory lap.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A satisfying expansion of the Inheritance Games universe from the Hawthorne brothers’ perspectives. Barnes’s plotting remains as propulsive as ever, and the dual POV structure reveals new dimensions of two characters who had been compelling but slightly opaque in the main trilogy.