The Grandest Game

shoutout to 2x speed on audible and the hurricane that kept waking me up last night – this book would probably never have been finished without you guys! because a 2 star rating is lowkey generous!before i get into my mini rant, i want to warn all the grayson girlies that this was very much marketed terrible and actually isn’t a book following him. he serves essentially the same purpose as he did in the original series but has a love interest this time. you don’t get his pov, you don’t even really focus on him except for where lyra is concerned. so if you’re reading this for grayson content i’m sorry girlie but you’re gonna be severely let down.i said this in my last review too so excuse me if i sound like a broken record, but you really could not pay me to care about 95% of this book. it was drawn out and boring and bland and ugh.if you love the whole puzzle/riddle solving aspect of this series and somehow aren’t sick of it at this point, you’re gonna love this. the entire book is essentially the players in the game trying to solve an escape room within an escape room within an escape room. that’s all it is.i’m just really tired of the puzzles being the sole thing in these when we’re five books into the series. it was fun for a book or two but i want actual PLOT. i want developed characters that i can like or connect to. i want actual mystery. because there’s only a certain number of ways you can write the process of solving puzzles, and jlb has long used them all up.the characters lacked any personality. or at least, any personality beyond maybe two surface level traits. we get three POVs of characters that are wildly different but somehow there were still all bland. i mean my notes literally say:lyra - entire personality is call with grayson and dad mystery. and running until she can’t breathe.gigi - is somehow 18? acts all of 10 and the happy go lucky sunshine thing reads quirky in a not like other girls way. ick.rohan - had SO MUCH POTENTIAL. was my favorite bc he had a little humor ig? i wish we could’ve learned more about his past tho.savannah - babe u are not above anyone, not better than anything. u are grumpy and annoying and insufferable. somehow she’s a student athlete at college but as someone who works with student athletes and is in college, i can guarantee she wouldn’t last a day acting the way she does.grayson - was grayson. slightly more tolerable than in past books but still bothers me. he’s 20 something and acts like he’s elon musk when he hasn’t actually done anything remarkable in the big picture.knox & brady - okay they were intriguing!!! i want to know more about their story and how it ties in with everything (which it will) but why did knox alone lowkey carry the book.on the note of characters, there’s a lot of unnecessary romance. i mean literally somehow 3 different romance subplots going on? and i felt nothing between any of them. grayson and lyra are only connected by the mystery thing, rohan and savannah are literally just using each other, gigi and brady came out of nowhere when there is ZERO connection there. it overtook the plot (but not the puzzles! never the puzzles.), which was an issue i had with tig so i shouldn’t be surprised here.the last 50ish pages really saved this book for me. well, saved isn’t the right word but the ending was a severe cliffhanger on so many levels so of course i’m gonna read the next one and probably hate it but i need answers. i am nothing if not curious to a fault!pre readi’m not really an inheritance games girlie, i’m most definitely not a grayson girlie, but i still somehow got roped into reading this. how did we end up here.