Jennifer Lynn Barnes returns to the world of the Inheritance Games, her bestselling viral BookTok saga, in the new spinoff series launch, The Grandest Game. After a sprawling inaugural event, the second annual Grandest Game—a competition run by Tobias Hawthorne’s grandsons and Avery Grambs, the teen who inherited the eccentric billionaire’s fortune—promises to be a more intimate affair. After procuring a coveted golden ticket for entry, contestants must race against the clock—and one another—to solve increasingly elaborate puzzles. Many of the players have secrets. Some have diabolical intent. All will do whatever it takes to win. In a conversation with PW, Barnes discussed the future of the Inheritance Games, the different ways individuals leverage power, and how gossip, fiction, fandom, and psychology go hand in hand.
What new ground does The Grandest Game cover?
In The Grandest Game, we’re stepping away a bit from Avery and the Hawthornes to introduce an entirely new world and new players who are competing in this mind twisting game of Avery’s design. The Grandest Game is covering a lot of new ground in part because we have new point of view characters who are bringing in a broader perspective.
One thing I wanted to do with the Inheritance Games series was, in any given book, include layers and clues that are not only relevant to that book, but also other clues that would only be relevant if I ever got to write future books. There’s a quote in one of the previous books where Jameson Hawthorne basically says, “This is Hawthorne House. We’re Hawthornes. There’s always another mystery, there’s always another secret.” For years, I’ve had these ideas about what those secrets and mysteries might be.
How did you choose which teens were going to be the POV characters?
I wanted to follow the people who had the strongest motivation to win the game; who were coming from different places geographically, emotionally, and in terms of their history with the Hawthorne family; and who would approach the puzzles in different ways. I wanted characters who would bring out different elements of not only the other players, but of the people running the game, the characters we already know so well.
In the PW cover reveal of The Hawthorne Legacy, you said you used everything you knew about the psychology of fiction to write The Inheritance Games. How did your psychology background play into developing this new series?
There’s a theory that says we like fiction because it co-opts an evolutionarily hardwired desire for gossip, and what is fiction if not gossip about people who aren’t real? So I’d ask myself, “What are my gossip seeds?” In the case of The Grandest Game, it’s this game that the whole world wants to play and everyone wants to know who’s going to win. It’s the thing that everyone is gossiping about: how is this going to turn out?
I actually made a giant workbook for myself that goes through about eight theories from the psychology of fiction and what it predicts about what we like in stories. I also consider the psychology of fandom and what it is about stories that inspires imaginative and emotional engagement in readers. As I’m plotting out a book, as I’m looking at the characters, I’m continually going back to those theories. It affects the big picture when I’m laying things out, but it also affects things like what language I’m using. I’ll actually look at individual chapters and say, “What is this specific chapter doing for me, not just in terms of the plot and the characters, but in terms of those buttons that I really want to be pushing?”
When I revise a book, I’ll do the pass to see where I’m at with every single element that goes into why our brains like stories. I look at hardwired pleasures in the brain, things like competition, power, wealth, and beauty. Sometimes I assign those to different characters. Two characters in The Grandest Game, for example, are very clearly my competition characters. They’re always going to be racing each other and trying to one up each other, so they’re the ones you’re going to get a lot of competition language from.
How do themes of wealth, privilege, and exclusivity show up in The Grandest Game?
This new series is far more about power than the Inheritance Games. For many of the characters, the Grandest Game is very much about exploring the idea not just of wealth, but of power. In the same sense that money is power, what other things are also power? Knowledge, leverage, privilege: I’m looking at all these things and how they intersect.
A year prior to the start of the book, there was a first game that anyone could play in. Part of the reason I chose to write about the second annual Grandest Game with this more intimate group is because I think there’s another element of fiction that’s related to belonging and to going from being on the outside of something to being on the inside of something. For the Inheritance Games series, broadly, this sense of belonging applied to being a part of the Hawthorne family and so, over the course of the original trilogy, Avery becomes a part of their world. So I really wanted to create an intimate setting where the players are entering into a world that, in some sense, readers already know. And those characters are going through the process of becoming part of that world.
What do readers need to know before diving into The Grandest Game?
Readers don’t have to read The Inheritance Games before reading The Grandest Game—it’s written as an entry point to the world, so you can come into a completely fresh. I will say, however, that people who have read the entire saga will have a better chance at solving all the overall mysteries. There are clues in all four of the original Inheritance Games books that are going to come into play in the Grandest Game series, so if you read all of it, you’re going to have more pieces of the puzzle than someone who just comes in at The Grandest Game.
What can you tell us about the next book in the series?
I have finished the first draft. I’d say the Grandest Game series in general includes the maximum number of puzzles and games that I’ve been able to include in a thing. I love playing the role of Avery—writing the puzzle sequences and designing the game that people are playing. But while book two is very much still focused on the puzzles, you definitely see the wider mystery coming more to the front of things. The Grandest Game is also a very romantic series. You’ve got multiple romances in the first book that we’re just starting to see develop, but there’s a deepening of things and a complicating of things in book two.
What else are you working on?
Right now? Nothing. I do have a couple of other books lined up—I wrote an entire first draft of a book in a totally new series when I was pregnant with my third child in 2020—but then The Inheritance Games really took off, so I redirected my energy toward that series. You might see that book in a couple of years, but right now, I’m setting up the end of the Grandest Game and bringing the whole Inheritance Games world to what will ultimately be its conclusion.
The Grandest Game by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Little, Brown, $19.99 July 30, ISBN 978-0-316-48101-4
