Violence and Intimate Partner Abuse Theme Analysis

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 nasty man named Drake who escalates from abusing her verbally to hitting her. Avery’s apparently middle-class best friend Max has a boyfriend who, after Max breaks up with him, sends her parents intimate pictures of her—that is, he abuses her via revenge porn. Finally, Nan, the mother-in-law of multibillionaire Tobias Hawthorne, reveals to Avery that her husband once broke all her fingers because he was jealous of the attention her excellent piano-playing garnered. Thus, the novel illustrates that a higher class status doesn’t necessarily protect people from abuse by their intimate partners: Nan and Max as well as Libby suffer abuse.

The novel also highlights how wealth can make a person a target for violence, as others seek to gain access to their money. Avery and Libby almost immediately come to fear for Avery’s life once she learns about her inheritance and the stipulations of the will, fearing that one of the Hawthornes might plot to murder her. Later in the novel, Drake actually tries to murder Avery, aided by the Hawthorne brothers’ mother Skye. That Avery experiences violence in this way exposes that her wealth doesn’t protect her from becoming a target. 

Yet the novel does suggest that money gives people more options to respond once violence is threatened or occurs. For example, once Avery has inherited billions, she can pay for lawyers to get Libby a temporary restraining order against Drake and can instruct Libby’s new private security to defend her. She also hires private security for herself, and her head of security, Oren, works hard to ensure Avery’s safety throughout the novel. Thus, the novel highlights how abuse happens to people of all economic classes, but people with access to money have more (and more effective) ways to respond to it.