The Inheritance Games

This audiobook lived in my head rent free for several days, so it's got that going for it. Despite being a completely unrealistic YA mystery novel, it was definitely engaging. It was compared to Knives Out, which I loved. That said, I thought this was a standalone when I picked it up, but it turns out it's a trilogy and the third one isn't even out yet and I am for sure not invested enough in these characters to bother.

Anyway. This is unrealistic in almost every way. Kazillionaire Tobias Hawthorne lives in a mansion somewhere in the middle of Texas with like a 50,000-room house because he can't stop renovating and adding secret passageways and hiding clues in secret compartments all over the freaking house, which has like 6 libraries in it. So he dies after a short illness, but only after being super weird and hard on his grandsons for their whole lives and making sure they are experts on like everything, because if you're enormously rich there's nothing more important than also being the absolute best at, say, building Rube Goldberg machines or looking pained while wearing suits. He decided to give all his \(\)\(\)$$ to charity (big middle fingers, family!) except then something mysterious happens and instead he decides to give everything to this girl Avery who lives in her car, who he's been spying on for years like a big ol' weirdo.

Cue family outrage. How daaaaare you not give billions of dollars to people who don't like you and whom you don't like, when you can play games and make everyone's lives miserable while making them jump through hoops you engineered before your demise! Cue pained expressions!

The four Hawthorne brothers were virtually interchangeable, with a few personality hints brought up often in case you can't remember which one is which. Xander likes scones! Jameson will always call Avery a condescending nickname despite her asking him not to! Grayson has gray eyes lol! and Nash is older and hardly factors in at all. Every boy is a love interest, except Nash, primarily because he is Old. Like, 22 or something! Also you HAVE to have sexual tension with a whole bunch of boys whose inheritance you've just scooped. It's like, the law.

The audiobook would have been fine except the narrator gave every Hawthorne an annoying draaaawwwwl.

Entertaining enough, but ready to move on. 2.5.