Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been, in turn, a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She's been writing for as long as she can remember, finished her first full book (which she now refers to as a "practice book" and which none of you will ever see) when she was still in high school, and then wrote Golden the summer after her freshman year in college, when she was nineteen.
Jen graduated high school in 2002, and from Yale University with a degree in cognitive science (the study of the brain and thought) in May of 2006. She'll be spending the 2006-2007 school year abroad, doing autism research at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
So many events and experiences squeezed into a specific calendar window; the mind boggles.
Avery Kylie Grambs is hanging on for dear life to the hope of graduation. All she needs are strong enough grades to get a scholarship to UConn, where she will study to become an actuary. That’s all she wants. But, what she gets is beyond imagining.
A Texas billionaire has left her something in his will. She doesn’t know him, or how he knows her, but she and her guardian let themselves be bundled onto an airplane, flying first class, and wind up at Hawthorne House.
There is a family in residence - the daughters and grandsons of the billionaire - and longtime staff, the lawyers and Avery and Libby. All waiting for the will to be read.
And...the tornado touches down. Avery is not in Connecticut anymore, let alone Kansas. She is the primary beneficiary of the final will and testament of one Tobias Tattersall Hawthorne.
An inveterate puzzler/gamer/power mogul, Tobias Hawthorne has spent years manipulating his family into playing his games. There was always a profit and a cost to the players, so that winning always had nuances. But, now everything’s going sideways.
Finding her footing, isn’t the only puzzle Avery has to solve. And even staying alive gets put on the table. But, Avery is up to the challenge! Are you?
This was how I read the third book, I really liked the way the series ended and honestly I have a lot of admiration for how the author formed all these threads and tied everything together.