The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Pub. Penguin Books, 2020.

Avery Kylie Grambs is 17 years old, she lives in her car, her mother is dead, she has nothing to do with her father and she has a sister who is in a dysfunctional relationship with her boyfriend. She is positive in her attitude to life but the future doesn’t look hopeful.

Then she is visited by a lawyer who tells her she is a beneficiary in a will left by an eccentric billionaire Tobias Hawthorne who has four sons of similar age to Avery. When the will is read Avery has inherited $46 billion and the rest of the Hawthorne family are left scraps. Why?

The terms of the will are iron tight and if the family challenge it, they get nothing. Avery is taken by the family lawyers to Hawthorne Mansion, a fabulous house with a theatre, bowling ally and a thousand rooms, plus staff. Avery is advised by a lawyer and has a bodyguard who was same for Tobias Hawthorne.

The family are hostile and the terms of the will mean she has to stay in the house for a year in order to inherit what has been left her. She fears for her life and rightly so.

The paparazzi are all over the place and everybody wants to know who this Avery is. She has to relate to the four sons two of which she is attracted to.

The old man Hawthorne was a game player. He liked mysteries and promoted competition and games amongst his sons. The biggest mystery is Why Avery? She doesn’t know herself. The rest of the novel is spent working out the mysteries that the Old Man has set.

This novel is written in 91 short chapters that will keep you in the book long after you want to stop reading. It is compelling and very clever. I loved it you will too.

Lucy Bee and the Secret Gene by Anne Ingram

Lucy Bee and the Secret gene by Anne Ingram. Pub. White Gull Press, 2014.

If you have ever looked at your mother and father and said to yourself “I look nothing like them” then you have something in common with Lucy Bee.

Lucy has thick frizzy hair and it bothers her. On the way home from school one day an older boy calls her a fuzzy haired freak and throws her school bag on the road. It bothers her big time. Where did she get the fuzzy hair from? She decides she has been adopted and her parents are not really hers. She puts it to her mother who says don’t be silly of course you are our daughter and shows photographs of herself pregnant and Lucy as a baby

Lucy is not convinced and speculates perhaps she was swapped at birth. I wonder how many children have had the same fears Lucy has? I would say heaps.

Then a school science project gives Lucy and her friend Megan to prove one way or the other what the truth is. Lucy decides to get in touch with all her relatives on both sides of the family, do a family tree and ask them all what traits they all have that are similar to hers. Will she get to the bottom of it all?

Excellent, simple story that is easy to read. Lucy has great parents and the issue of childhood friends gets an airing. Plus somebody has burnt the Junior school down.

Very appealing read-a-loud book for middle school and intermediate.