The Inheritance Games

The Inheritance Games shows that while money and social class often go hand-in-hand, this doesn’t mean they’re the same thing—they differ in how they give people power, and how much power they offer. Money is a form of direct power: the amount of money that a person has helps determine how much control they have over their circumstances. By contrast, social class affects a person’s indirect power, or their influence: a person’s perceived social class…

The Inheritance Games represents competition, cooperation, and manipulation as three key elements of multi-player games—key elements that can be constructive if they are kept in a healthy balance but destructive otherwise. In the novel, Texas multibillionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves almost his entire fortune to working-class teenager Avery Kylie Grambs, who (as far as she can remember) never knew Tobias at all. Tobias’s four grandsons, Nash, Grayson, Jameson, and Xander…

The Inheritance Games describes two possible models of charity: a model where people give to others out of empathy and a desire to help one particular individual, and a contrasting impersonal model where people give on a purely rational basis to achieve structural change. The novel ultimately suggests that both models are valuable and praiseworthy. Protagonist Avery Kylie Grambs, a poor, working-class high school student, uses money she wins hustling her classmates in poker…

The Inheritance Games shows how abuse from intimate partners, and violence from others, can affect people from all different class backgrounds—though people with money have more resources to protect themselves from violence. The novel argues for the ubiquity of abuse by representing at least three different abusive relationships harming women from different class backgrounds. Protagonist Avery Kylie Grambs’s half-sister Libby, a working-class orderly in a nursing home, has a tumultuous relationship with a…