In the past two weeks, I have read ten and a half books by Jennifer Lynn Barnes and googled (by which I mean searched on TikTok) “Books like The Inheritance Games” more times than I would like to admit.
I have a complicated relationship with reading. It is one of my favorite things in the world to do—far preferable to watching television—but it is also something that I have to be careful to keep at arm’s length from myself. Like with any tangential-to-intellectual hobby, I think it can be easy for self-worth to get tangled up in there, impossibly woven together with how many books, what kind of books, and how quickly you’re reading them.
I like to set a Goodreads goal for the year. It is something that keeps me motivated. I like the feeling of clicking “read” on a book and thinking that I might one day go back and add a rating or review. I like having a log of the past year—of my lifetime—in books. This year, presumably due to the fact that I was planning a wedding and have yet to have an eight day sickness where I can lay in bed and do nothing but read, I have been ten books behind my goal since nearly day one.
Being behind on my goal is not something that I do particularly well with. It’s a persistent nagging in the back of my head, though no more so than Amazon’s “average time to read” not matching up with my own. I have always read quickly, and I have always been easily distractible, so my pace is a bit all over the place, with Kindle jumping drastically between the number of minutes left in my current read.
A few weeks back—in the middle of a million books and finishing none—I picked up The Inheritance Games. I’ve said before that I think my favorite genre of book is “rich man dies and leaves puzzle”. It’s not the most prevalent genre in the world, but it’s there if you know what you’re looking for. The Inheritance Games fits this mold to a tee.
I plowed through all of the books in the original series, researching when between the two series I was meant to read the collection of short stories—between the first book in the new series and the second. When I finished, I found a review saying that the reader wished that Barnes would invest as much in her earlier series The Naturals as she had in The Inheritance Games, so naturally I started that series as well. In the last two days, I read all four books in The Naturals and started the first book in The Debutantes duology—which is getting a re-release along with The Fixer which if I had to guess I will read as well.
It has been a while since I have found an author whose work I like enough read back to back to back and who has enough of a backlog for it to feel truly like I’m marathoning. This is a type of reading that I did a lot as a child. I think it is a type of reading that is easier to do when you are new to the world and every series is a set of 200 short novels written by a collective of authors under one pen name. I read all of the Little House on the Prairie books—not just Laura’s—as well as all of The Magic Treehouse, A-Z Mysteries, Nancy Drew, Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven, The Belgariad, and Rick Riordan’s novels. I was reading obscure backlogged titles that I am sure their publishers were shocked to see a sale from, because when I like an author, I really like an author. I read less fantasy now than I used to, but I still enjoy existing within a consistent universe for more than one book at a time—a void most often filled by romance novels nowadays.
Though I do still on occasion find new authors and spend weeks to months reading nothing but their work—thinking of little else, dreaming of little else—this has largely been replaced by a working knowledge of publication calendars. At any given time, I am waiting on a new book from twenty authors. The publication date for the third book in Cassandra Clare’s The Chronicles of Castellane has yet to be released, which is made alright by the recent release of Holly Black’s Thief of Night. I am waiting on the next book in the Truly Devious series by Maureen Johnson—my second favorite genre, which is teen detective—whatever Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood put out next regardless of quality, the next book in the Shady Hollow series, Andrew Joseph White’s adult debut You Weren’t Meant to Be Human, Ava Reid’s Inamorata, and now, a number of books from Barnes (e.g., The Same Backward as Forward, The Gilded Blade, and whatever she was teasing for The Naturals).
I read plenty for entertainment; reading for reading’s sake. Just as often, however, I am reading—taking notes like a crazy person, hoarding highlights—for the sake of my writing. I keep a journal of quotes from books (dialogue and exposition both) good advice, overheard snippets of conversation. My Goodreads tracks the highlights in my ebooks—incomplete and often incomprehensible. I think it is easy to feel, when reading a book on writing as a craft, like you’re learning, growing as an artist. Of course, you think, the rough draft is the farthest thing from the untarnished idea I have in my head. I bet if I set a timer every morning and wrote continuously, I could finish a book within the year. A lot of this advice, while poetic, regimented and good enough for some, is not effective. It’s not practical.
I find that often I am most inspired when I am not looking to be. While reading Barnes’ backlog, I have found myself writing—notes in the margin, small bits of text on my phone—and discussing what it means to be human, what it is that drives a story forward, keeps us interested. I once heard Holly Black speak about how in a page-turner the most important thing to keep in mind is what the character wants and what the character feels. She said this was the way you could plan out plot beats for individual novels versus series (i.e., did the character achieve a goal or did they achieve the goal?) Barnes’ novels play around a lot with a, in my opinion, slightly more nuanced version of this, layering in what the character knows.
Let’s assume that people’s greatest fears are directly opposite to their greatest desires, an oversimplification perhaps, but good for the thought experiment. For instance, a character who is searching for a home or a place to belong (e.g., found family) might be afraid for the safety of individual members or the dissolution of their newfound family unit as a whole. And then we add in their scope of knowledge, meaning, in this instance potentially, their inability to know the thoughts and feelings of those in the family unit which could lead to a pervasive doubt about their place within the group, a view of themselves as a perpetual outsider. That fear or perception isn’t necessarily dependent on reality so much as it is dependent on their understanding of reality.
In Barnes’ series The Naturals, the characters are young adults who have been recruited to the FBI for their natural gifts in things like profiling and statistics. Each of the children has a clearly defined scope—with what they are in the dark about just as concrete. For instance, one of the boys can read emotions on people’s faces and in their body language, while another one of the girls is good at broader profiling, making sense of patterns in behavior or groups of people. While the girl might be more beneficial in extrapolating to the killer’s personality from the details uncovered at the crime scene, the boy might be more useful in interrogations. The Criminal-Minds-for-Children plot aside, this leads to really interesting interactions between them interpersonally.
I have also been thinking a lot about the difference between thinking, knowing, and thinking you know. There were a lot of instances in the book along the lines of “I know normally XYZ means XYZ, but right now, I think it means something else based on a deeper understanding of either the person’s personality or the circumstance than I would have had if I believed the first half of the sentence to be true.” But I think knowing is subjective, with people’s threshold for using the word “think” varying widely. If Gmail was reviewing my threshold, they would say “please please please remove this phrase from your vocabulary” but I don’t mean that sentence in a declarative and confident way, I have hedged it in my perception of the world, in my current mental moment, on purpose.
There is a line in Normal People which reads,
“When she saw Connell, she hesitated on the stairs and said: I didn’t know you were here, sorry. Maybe she seemed flustered but not really badly or anything. Then she went back up to her room. After she left, he stood there in the hall waiting. He knew she was probably getting dressed in her room, and whatever clothes she was wearing when she came back down would be the clothes she had chosen to put on after she saw him in the hall. Anyway, Lorraine was ready to go before Marianne reappeared so he never did get to see what clothes she had put on. It wasn’t like he deeply cared to know.”
I have a lot of thoughts about this quote, and very little of it is likely to build on the effect the original quote has on its own, but that’s not the point of writing on my own Substack really, nor is it the goal of me keeping notes and thoughts about writing well. So, giving me grace for not having anything original to say here, I think that Connell (and Marianne both) are made compelling by how complex their scope of knowledge is. Connell’s awareness that it is impossible for Marianne’s choice of outfit to be made absent him is innate. It is simple. The scope here is limited, however, by a number of factors.
They both, throughout the novel, have an instinctual yet deeply flawed understanding of the other. Sometimes, I think the atomic level of understanding they feel for one another is the root of the problem. Other times, there is a limiting environmental factor. Here, Connell knows that his presence affects Marriane’s getting dressed, but he will never know what she chose to wear, she will never know that he cared to know, he may never truly know that he cared to know, and they will never again have this exact moment. The understanding is fleeting and bordering on unimportant and yet I think it’s one of the most impactful lines in the book to me. The mundane made memorable by Sally Rooney’s once-in-a-generational ability to put universal but insignificant feelings into words.
Do I think Barnes’ writing is on the same level as Rooney’s? No, and yet, there are a multitude of quotes throughout where I paused just the same, such as,
He was listening, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he understood.
Fact, assumption. Assumption accepted as fact.
“Anyone ever tell you that you see too much?” he asked me. “You didn’t plan on saying any of those things. I’m not sure you even knew them until they came out of your mouth.”
Instinct > Knowing. There was a lot of conversation in this series about instinct informing the discovery of truth but not equalling truth outright.
Her chest heaved with agitation. No, not agitation, I realized. Seeing the look in Dean’s eye, the way he’d moved, she was excited.
Assumption followed by deduction.
This time, I could see a manic intensity in Redding’s eyes. He looked at Dean, and the only thing he saw was himself—
Analysis, conjecture.
You get the point. Or do you? I’m not entirely sure that these quotes stand up outside of the context of their broader narrative. All I mean to say is that these books—when added to everything else I’ve read and heard and studied—have given me a new way to consider people’s motivations, to consider what makes a story feel propulsive, enticing, “unputdownable”. I think Barnes is extremely intelligent. The puzzles in the Inheritance Games were fun to solve; rarely did I solve them before the characters (which is not always the case with a puzzle within a book or game). The mysteries in The Naturals were layered but not unbelievable. Similarly to the way I felt when I read Truly Devious, I like to be surprised. I like to feel challenged. And I think I honestly respect Barnes more for the challenge and the structure of her books more when considered within the context of the Young Adult genre.
Please note! I am not opposed to Young Adult and Middle Grade books being aimed at children! I just think I really respect when people can toe the line between making content accessible and not oversimplifying or underestimating their audience’s reading level or lived experience.
I think that if I had had books like this and Maureen Johnson’s to read at age eleven, I would have been ecstatic. I did have Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society and, even earlier, Encyclopedia Brown, but in those stories, the characters are the geniuses, the content still clearly catered to a child.
I think a good example of a book with a complex plot but extremely simple sentence structure is the Percy Jackson series. I would not get out of those books what I got out of them as a child if I read them for the first time today. Once again, fine(!) seeing as they are for children. In contrast, Andrew Joseph White’s novels, while still Young Adult are visceral and deal with layered issues of gender identity and sexism and classism. They don’t pull punches, but they are still appropriate for their age range. I think I really respect a book for young audiences that respects its reader. Those are the kinds of books that I am grateful that my children will have the opportunity to read. I am grateful for the continued expansion and evolution of the Young Adult and New Adult genres over even the past ten years.
And I am grateful for billionaires who leave their money tied up in puzzles.
Our reading habits as kids were so similar! Loved reading dis, thank you for sharing your words 🤠