Recent Reads | The Grandest Game and A Novel Love Story

The Grandest Game by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Series: The Grandest Game #1
Genres: Young Adult, Mystery/Thriller
on July 30, 2024
Also by this author: The Fixer, The Long Game, Little White Lies, The Lovely and the Lost, Deadly Little Scandals , The Inheritance Games , The Hawthorne Legacy , The Final Gambit , The Naturals, Killer Instinct , All In , Bad Blood , The Brothers Hawthorne
Format: Audio/Physical (400 pages) • Source: Purchased, Spotify Audiobooks
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Get ready for a new series that brings readers deeper into the lush, romantic, and puzzle-filled world of the #1 bestselling Inheritance Games series (over 3 million copies sold!), set a year after we last saw Avery and the Hawthornes.

Seven tickets. An island of dreams. The chance of a lifetime.

Welcome to the Grandest Game, an annual competition run by billionaire Avery Grambs and the four infamous Hawthorne brothers, whose family fortune she inherited. Designed to give anyone a shot at fame and fortune, this year’s game requires one of seven golden tickets to enter. With millions on the line, those seven players will do whatever it takes to win.

Some of the players are in it for the money. Some for power. Some for reasons all their own. Every single one of them has secrets. Amidst it all is Grayson Hawthorne, tasked with a vital role in this year’s game. But as tensions rise and the mind-bending challenges push the players to their limits—physically, mentally, and emotionally—it soon becomes clear that not everyone is playing by the rules.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Lynn Barnes delivers a brand-new series in the world of The Inheritance Games, where fan-favorite and new characters collide in a game you’ll never forget.

Do you have what it takes to play?

Jennifer Lynn Barnes is one of my auto-buy authors and really has been since 2015 with her criminally underrated THE FIXER series. It’s been banger after banger. This book was pretty much no exception to that! THE INHERITANCE GAMES series is the one that has stuck with me the most out of all of her books and series, I’d say… I love that she keeps adding to the world!

The previous installment was a bit of a bridge book between the original series (with Avery as the main character), featuring some of the Hawthorne brothers. It definitely felt like a bridge and was a little hard to get into, so I was hopeful this “fresh start” series would be better. It certainly was!

Avery, with her billions of dollars, developed an annual game to give away her money in the spirit of the way SHE got it… games and tricks and riddles and puzzles. This story is the second annual game and brings the POVs of characters like Rohan, Lyla, and Gigi to the table (along with other players in the game like Knox, Brady, and Odette).

I’ll admit this did take me a while to get into, much like the previous book, but I think it’s because it’s a new story and I was on the fence about the characters. Once I got into it though… it was hard to put down! That’s what I count on JLA for. The story itself was fun and chockfull of different puzzles and riddles. The new characters were decent but honestly not as fun to follow as the Hawthornes and Avery.

I’ve always said that I could read books in this world forever and that’s probably true… but I can also see that it may run its course with the final installment in this series and the book of short stories coming out in a few months.

I received this book for free (hey, thanks!) in exchange for an honest review. I promise that this does NOT affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. For real.

A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Magical Realism
Published by Penguin on June 25, 2024
Also by this author: Geekerella, The Princess and the Fangirl, The Dead Romantics, The Seven Year Slip
Format: eARC (384 pages) • Source: Publisher
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THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

Most Anticipated by Parade · Buzzfeed · Harper’s Bazaar · Elle · She Reads · The Seattle Times · BookRiot and more!

A professor of literature finds herself caught up in a work of fiction…literally, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Year Slip and The Dead Romantics.

Eileen Merriweather loves to get lost in a good happily-ever-after. The fictional kind, anyway. Because at least imaginary men don’t leave you at the altar. She feels safe in a book. At home. Which might be why she’s so set on going her annual book club retreat this year—she needs good friends, cheap wine, and grand romantic gestures—no matter what.

But when her car unexpectedly breaks down on the way, she finds herself stranded in a quaint town that feels like it’s right out of a novel…

Because it is.

This place can’t be real, and yet… she’s here, in Eloraton, the town of her favorite romance series, where the candy store’s honey taffy is always sweet, the local bar’s burgers are always a little burnt, and rain always comes in the afternoon. It feels like home. It’s perfect—and perfectly frozen, trapped in the late author’s last unfinished story.

Elsy is sure that’s why she must be here: to help bring the town to its storybook ending.

Except there is a character in Eloraton that she can’t place—a grumpy bookstore owner with mint-green eyes, an irritatingly sexy mouth and impeccable taste in novels. And he does not want her finishing this book.

Which is a problem because Elsy is beginning to think the town’s happily-ever-after might just be intertwined with her own.

Ashley Poston has been one of my favorite authors dating back to her YA days. Her adult romance novels have been stellar to this point. I was afraid to read this one and genuinely put it off for months.

I saw some reviews that it was boring and I had no idea how THIS premise could be boring but oh man, was it ever. If I read this without knowing who the author was I wouldn’t believe it was Poston. The idea is SO great here but the execution was very bad! The story follows Eileen as she stumbles into the small town from her favorite book series, tragically cut short due to the death of the author. She immediately starts meddling in the characters’ lives and falls for the bookstore owner, a man who was not written into the series that she remembered.

Unfortunately everything was very slow. Almost nothing happens through the first 75% – I couldn’t even tell you anything aside from the basic premise above. It was a struggle to get through, which I just didn’t see coming. Poston usually does such a great job with the magical realism romances.

She kept describing the MMC as having “minty eyes” and smelling like black tea… over and over AND OVER again. The Kindle keyword search showed “mint” or “minty” a total of *31* times. Genuinely insane! I was trying to figure out if she did it on purpose to be super meta and overuse a romance trope but it didn’t work if that was the intention. The romance in general was actually bad: poorly written, simultaneously too slow and too rushed, and the couple had zero chemistry. During the third act breakup I actually thought there was a chance this wasn’t a romance novel and that they’d stay apart (partially because it came out of nowhere and was incredibly forced, and also because I didn’t enjoy them as a couple enough to care if they got back together).

By the end, the whole thing felt entirely pointless. All of the meddling she did with the townspeople and side characters didn’t really serve a purpose. I didn’t hate the actual ending of the book because it made sense but it wasn’t enough to really redeem anything for me. Let’s hope this was just Poston’s first and only miss!

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