The Grandest Game

The narration shifts to the present day and to the perspective of Lyra Kane, an 18-year-old college student. Exhausted from a recurring nightmare about witnessing her biological father’s death by suicide when she was a small child, Lyra falls asleep in class. When she wakes, a professor tells her that she has 10 minutes left to finish the exam in front of her. Lyra uses her puzzle-solving abilities to quickly reason out the answers and complete the test. The skeptical professor insists on immediately grading the exam and is astonished that she scores 94%. When he chides Lyra for putting in so little effort that she has never even appeared in his lectures before, she explains that this is because she isn’t a member of his class; she fell asleep in the class before this one.

That afternoon, Lyra’s mother calls. Lyra has hidden the memory of her father’s death by suicide, which resurfaced after the news began frequently mentioning the Hawthorne family name. She briefly tries to engage in a normal conversation but must ask her mother about the delinquent tuition notice she received. When her mother insists, “Everything’s going to be fine” (10), Lyra thinks of how often she herself voiced this lie in recent months. When she suggests that she can take a year off college to earn money, her mother refuses to hear the idea, instead saying that she and Lyra’s stepfather can sell Mile’s End, the home that has been in the Kane family for generations. Lyra finds this suggestion upsetting.

Lyra goes for a long run; this hobby has replaced her previous interest in dance because it helps her deal with the trauma of recalling her father’s death. After her run, she heads for the Registrar’s office, intending to withdraw from school. She can’t quite bring herself to do it, however, and instead she ends up at the school post office. In her mailbox is an invitation to compete in the Grandest Game, along with a mysterious note: “YOU DESERVE THIS” (15).

Grayson Hawthorne tries to deliver an invitation to the Grandest Game to his younger half-sister, Gigi Grayson. Gigi refuses to accept it, even when he warns her that Avery’s instructions were to give the invitation to Gigi’s twin sister, Savannah, if Gigi refused it. Savannah’s many accomplishments intimidate Gigi, but she hopes that Savannah will be too busy to accept the invitation. The text reveals that Gigi is keeping an important secret from her sister, which the novel later reveals is that their father died while trying to kill Avery Grambs. Gigi feels guilty about his terrible actions and doesn’t want her sister to carry this burden.

Gigi was looking for one of the hidden invitations; she wants to win the game to give money to other people but wants to accomplish it on her own, not through family connections. Grayson tells her that he didn’t participate in constructing the games this year; he’ll run things on the island where the games will occur, and his siblings and Avery don’t want him to unconsciously give the contestants clues.

Rohan spent the previous year gathering information and planning a strategy. He found more than one of the four hidden invitations; he keeps one for himself and hides another for Gigi to find. He thinks through the list of contestants, whose identities he has uncovered. Of the six other competitors, he thinks that Savannah, Gigi, and Lyra all have the potential to be useful to him.

Jameson Hawthorne greets Lyra as she boards the helicopter to Hawthorne Island. Seeing a Hawthorne in person reminds her of her dream about her father’s death. She remembers him saying three things: He told her happy birthday, said “[a] Hawthorne did this,” and then offered a riddle: “What begins a bet? Not that” (25). She freezes when Grayson Hawthorne arrives: After she first had the dream, she decided that her father’s words must have referred to Tobias Hawthorne, the grandfather of the Hawthorne brothers. She called Grayson several times, trying to get information from him, until he abruptly told her to stop calling him. Rohan arrives. As Lyra listens to him talking, she realizes that he’s a skillful actor and can assume whatever persona is most useful to him.

Aboard the helicopter, Lyra meets two other competitors: Knox Landry and Odette Morales. Knox is in his mid-twenties, and Odette is 81. Lyra tries to avoid looking at Grayson, whom she considers “inhuman, in control, without mercy” (33). After they land, Jameson tells the contestants to explore the island and look for useful objects the game designers have hidden. They must go to the main house by sundown; anyone who is late will be eliminated from the game. As Lyra leaves, Grayson cautions her about the drop-off at the edge of the landing pad. When she answers him, she notices a strange expression on his face—one that his brother, Jameson, also notices.

As Lyra explores the island, Grayson finds her. He grabs her arm, thinking she’s too close to the cliff’s edge for safety. Irate, she says she can take care of herself. He tells her that he recognized her voice from her phone calls. She brushes him off, telling him to stay away from her from now on.

Gigi approaches Hawthorne Island by speedboat. With her are her twin sister, Savannah, and another competitor, Brady Daniels. Gigi feels terrible about how the secret she’s keeping from Savannah is creating distance between them. Brady, who’s in his early twenties, offers Gigi a hair tie when the wind whips her hair around. Although he seems reluctant to talk at first, Gigi’s relentless, cheerful chatter finally gets to him, and they talk about islands as exciting settings. Brady says that this is because they’re “closed systems,” explaining that this is a quantum physics term for systems that don’t allow anything in or out. Savannah warns Gigi not to trust him, because he’s her opponent, not her friend.

Gigi is determined to win the game because she almost never beats Savannah at anything and because giving away the money will help make up for the awful things her father did. She observes her surroundings carefully. Before she takes off to begin exploring the island, Xander Hawthorne offers her a few lighthearted words of encouragement. This gives her the idea to search the boat he delivered them to the island in, and she finds duct tape and a marker. She uses the marker to begin creating a map of the island on the back of her hand.

During her exploration of the island, Gigi discovers two steps with a hidden message: One says “MANGA,” and the other says “RA.” She writes these words on her stomach so that she can hide them with her shirt and then, after a moment’s hesitation, wipes the words from the steps. In an old boathouse, she runs into Odette, who discovered a pair of opera glasses and has been using them to spy on Brady and Knox. She tells Gigi that, through lip-reading a conversation the two are having, she thinks they know one another well and are arguing about a dead girl.

Around the base of a flagpole, Rohan discovers a chain with a lock. It’s inscribed with John Donne’s quote “No man is an island,” and Rohan’s mind leaps ahead to the end of the poem it’s from: “Never send to ask [sic] for whom the bell tolls…It tolls for thee” (49). He hears Savannah coming and hides. Seeing the chain and lock, she climbs up the flagpole with them to free them. Rohan climbs up after her to see how she’ll react; Savannah is unfazed and confident, even when Rohan begins flirting with her.

Lyra finds a note taped to a tree. On the same paper that was used for the note that accompanied her ticket to the game, she finds a single handwritten word: “THOMAS.” She’s shaken: It’s her father’s name. She finds another paper with the same word on it, then two more bearing the other variations of his name that he commonly used: “Thomasso” and “Tomás.” Lyra wonders if the Hawthornes invited her to play the game because of their connection to her father. Rohan and Savannah appear. Lyra explains what she found; Rohan tells her that whoever left the notes was cruel, making it unlikely Avery or the Hawthornes left them.

Gigi finds a black bag hidden in some brush. It contains a knife, a necklace, and scuba gear. She puts the necklace on and then inspects the knife and its sheath. Knox appears and tries to steal the bag from her. While he doesn’t physically threaten her, he tells her that if she doesn’t give him the bag he’ll get in her way and delay her return to the main house. Knowing that she’s a slow runner and will be eliminated if she doesn’t return by sunset, Gigi takes this threat seriously. However, she manages to keep the knife.

Rohan passes the front entrance of the main house and instead climbs up to enter through a fourth-story window. As he’s exploring, Nash Hawthorne finds him. Although the two haven’t met, Nash knows who Rohan is because of a fight Rohan once got into with Jameson at the Mercy. Nash predicts that Rohan won’t win the game.

Determined not to let the notes with her father’s names fluster her, Lyra proceeds deliberately to the main house, continuing to observe everything around her carefully. In the main entry, she finds cards with the players’ names. She picks up the elaborate bronze key next to her card. Part of its design looks like an infinity sign. Gigi rushes in, just making it before sundown. She picks up her own key and notices that the back of her name card has instructions to find her room and put on the ball costume she’ll find there.

In her room, Lyra finds a dark blue ball gown and a bejeweled mask. She dresses, reminding herself not to get carried away with the romance of the beautiful clothing—she’s there to compete. In a drawer, she finds a pair of glass dice. When she picks them up, a message appears on the bathroom mirror: “PLAYER NUMBER 4, LYRA KANE,” it says, “GAME ON” (74).

Before going downstairs to the ball, Lyra takes a few minutes to explore the floors above her. The top floor is a large circular library. There, she meets Avery Grambs. Avery tells her, “I was you once,” and then offers her a piece of advice about playing the game: “Sometimes […] in the games that matter most, the only way to play is to live” (77).

Lyra goes downstairs to the ball, which is in the Great Room. Xander Hawthorne introduces himself and asks her to dance. Grayson cuts in and brings up her phone calls. He says that his grandfather, Tobias, had an enemies list that included the name “Thomas Thomas.” Lyra says that her father’s last name wasn’t Thomas, but Grayson tells her that he found a file on this “Thomas Thomas” that matched information she gave about her father. All the information in the file was false, however. He tried to find Lyra to tell her but was unsuccessful. She’s skeptical given that Avery found her to send her an invitation to the game.