The Hawthorne Legacy

Back in Hawthorne House

The Hawthorne Legacy picks up where The Inheritance Games left off, with Avery Kylie Grambs installed in Hawthorne House, still navigating the question that structures the entire series: why did billionaire Tobias Hawthorne leave his entire fortune to a girl he had never met, cutting out his own family in the process?

Jennifer Lynn Barnes has built the Inheritance Games series around one of YA fiction’s most durable pleasures: the puzzle that generates more puzzles. Each revelation in the first book produced new questions, and the sequel deepens this structure while giving the individual Hawthorne brothers — Grayson, Jameson, Xander, Nash — more room to become fully individual rather than personality archetypes.

The Brothers Distinguished

The series’ greatest casting challenge is its quartet of Hawthorne boys, each defined by a different intellectual obsession and emotional wound. The Hawthorne Legacy succeeds most clearly in differentiating Grayson and Jameson — the two most central to Avery’s orbit — by giving each genuine depth rather than simply competing romantic relevance. Grayson’s rigidity and Jameson’s recklessness are revealed as two responses to the same grandfather’s psychological architecture.

Barnes’s Plotting Machine

Barnes has spoken about her approach to plotting as akin to solving her own puzzle: she knows the answer and builds the misdirection backward. This shows in the most complimentary way. The red herrings are genuinely misleading; the solutions are genuinely satisfying; and the clues planted early in the book pay off late without feeling planted. This is craft, not formula.

Avery Kylie Grambs

What distinguishes the series from comparable YA is Avery’s self-awareness about her situation. She knows she is in a game designed by a dead man who had reasons she does not yet understand. She participates anyway, because the alternative is passive victimhood and because she genuinely enjoys the puzzle. This is a protagonist who chooses her circumstances rather than merely enduring them, which makes her considerably more engaging to follow.

The Appeal of the Puzzle-Box

It is worth naming exactly what makes this series so compulsively readable, because The Hawthorne Legacy is built almost entirely from that single engine. Barnes has fashioned a fictional world that rewards the reader’s own desire to solve things: a sprawling mansion riddled with secret rooms and hidden passages, a dead billionaire who communicated in riddles and scavenger hunts, and a heroine who must decode clues to understand her own life. There is a deep, almost childlike pleasure in this — the same pleasure that powers escape rooms, true-crime podcasts, and a thousand mystery games — and Barnes, with her background in cognitive science, understands the psychology of it intimately. She doses out information with the precision of a game designer, ensuring that each answer arrives just as a fresh question opens, so that the reader is never quite satisfied and never quite able to stop. It is a formula, but an exceptionally well-engineered one, and the second book runs the machine at full throttle.

The Deepening Mystery

Where the first book asked why Tobias Hawthorne left everything to a stranger, The Hawthorne Legacy begins to answer it — and the answer pulls Avery’s own past into the heart of the puzzle. The trail leads to Toby, the patriarch’s adopted son long presumed dead, and to a hidden connection between the Hawthorne family and Avery’s late mother that reframes everything the first book established. Barnes layers in fresh dangers, too: the disinherited Hawthorne daughters, Skye and Zara, circle the fortune with their own agendas, and shadowy threats from outside the family raise the stakes from intellectual game to physical peril. As ever, the pleasure is watching the riddles nest inside one another — codes, hidden passages, and cryptic messages from beyond the grave — while the emotional questions about belonging, family, and trust quietly accumulate beneath the surface.

The Middle-Book Challenge

Second volumes in a trilogy are notoriously difficult: they must advance the story without resolving it, deepening the world while withholding the payoff. The Hawthorne Legacy navigates this well, answering enough of the first book’s questions to feel like genuine progress while opening new ones — and ending on a cliffhanger engineered to send readers straight to The Final Gambit. The honest trade-off is that some threads are clearly introduced here only to be paid off in the finale, and the love triangle between Avery, Jameson, and Grayson generates a tension that some readers find delicious and others find frustrating. But Barnes keeps the propulsion so high — short chapters, relentless reveals, cliff-edge endings — that the pages turn almost on their own.

A BookTok Sensation

It is worth situating the book in its cultural moment. Propelled by TikTok’s vast “BookTok” community, The Inheritance Games trilogy became one of the defining YA series of the early 2020s, turning the glossy puzzle-box thriller — billionaire’s mansion, brooding brothers, hidden fortune — into a dominant mode of the genre. The Hawthorne Legacy is the bridge that carried millions of readers deeper into Hawthorne House, and its success helped fuel the wider world Barnes has continued to build in follow-up books. This is unabashedly escapist entertainment, light on depth and heavy on twists, but within those terms it is expertly engineered, and it knows exactly what its readers came for.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A deeply satisfying sequel that delivers everything the first book promised and extends the mystery with confidence, powered by one of YA’s sharpest plotters.

Reading Guides

• The Inheritance Games — Full Review