Jenjenreviews

My first heist book!

Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours, Emily Wibberley, and Austin Siegemund-Broka for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary copy and media kit!

Book Information

The Inheritance Games meets Ocean’s 11 in this thrilling YA adventure about a teenager determined to pull off the perfect heist in the midst of her father’s wedding.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia Owens isn’t thrilled that her dad’s getting remarried…again. She’s especially not thrilled that he cheated on her mom, kicked them out of their Rhode Island home, and cut Olivia out of her rightful inheritance.

But this former heiress has a plan for revenge. While hundreds of guests gather on the grounds of the gorgeous estate where she grew up, everyone will be thinking romance—not robbery. She’ll play the part of dutiful daughter, but in reality she’ll be redistributing millions from her father’s online accounts. She only needs the handwritten pass code he keeps in the estate’s safe.

With the help of an eclectic crew of high school students and one former teacher, Olivia has plotted her mid-nuptial heist down to the second. But she didn’t plan for an obnoxiously nosy wedding guest, an interfering ex-boyfriend intent on winning her back, greedy European cousins with their own agenda, or a vengeful second wife. When everything seems like it’s going wrong, Olivia has to keep her eyes on what really matters: getting rich. And when she’s done, “something borrowed” will be the understatement of the year.

Book Links

• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180164877
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Heiress-Takes-All-Emily-Wibberley/dp/0316566756
• Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heiress-takes-all-emily-wibberley/1144153523
• IndieBound: https://bookshop.org/p/books/heiress-takes-all-emily-wibberley/20663748

About the Author

Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka met and fell in love in high school. Austin went on to graduate from Harvard, while Emily graduated from Princeton. Together, they are the authors of several novels about romance for teens and adults. Now married, they live in Los Angeles, where they continue to take daily inspiration from their own love story.

Author Links:

• Website: https://www.emilyandaustinwrite.com/
• Emily’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wibbs_ink/
• Austin’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/austins_b/
• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/10788120

Review (no spoilers)

If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.

Hello all! Let me preface this review by saying that I’ve been sick for the past week (still sick today), so it’s likely that my brain fog and tiredness has affected my reading experience. I eventually had to switch to the audiobook for this one because I couldn’t focus while reading the physical, and kept finding myself getting tired and putting it down.

Heiress Takes All is a book that likens itself to The Inheritance Games and Oceans 11 because it is a heist book surrounding a dysfunctional and toxic family. Our main character, Olivia, has spent weeks planning the perfect crime: stealing her estranged father’s fortune. Olivia’s childhood memories of her father are far from happy. Not only did he get annoyed at her for merely existing, he also cheated on her mother and blamed Olivia for the resulting fallout. Now that he’s marrying his third wife at an extravagant mansion wedding, Olivia has the perfect opportunity to infiltrate his safe and steal the passwords for his offshore accounts.

I’ve never read a heist book before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with this book, and now that I’ve finished it, I have a lot of mixed feelings. In my opinion, I feel like this would have performed better as a movie rather than a book. The pacing felt a bit weird, and the writing felt a bit repetitive. For instance, basically any time the main character was opening a door to enter a new room, she ran into someone “unexpected” and a wrench was thrown in her plans. It got to the point where I just wanted her to stop entering rooms.

There was something about the writing style and plot of this novel that felt disjointed to me. Sometimes Olivia would sound very mature and at other times she would sound very childish. As the mastermind of the operation, she was also a character that was very confident in her ability to plan and manipulate situations, yet she was a logistical mess the entire time. I found her characterization inconsistent in this aspect as one second she would talk about how she had to stay focused and keep everyone else on task, and then the next moment she would be getting completely sidetracked by wanting to make friends and being distracted by her ex-boyfriend.

In a way, I feel like this book portrayed a much more realistic version of what a heist performed by actual teenagers might look like. While I think all heist plots are wildly unrealistic, these characters are flawed in very teenage ways. They bicker and banter with each other, and use the heist group chat to ask about celebrity autographs when they’re supposed to be keeping their eyes on the prize. They naively think they have everything mapped to a T, but their plan falls apart at every turn. Basically, if you’re looking for a heist novel where everything works out perfectly, that’s not what’s happening here. In fact, I spent pretty much the entire book completely certain that nothing was going to work out in the end. But if you’re looking for a wild ride with teenage emotion/angst mixed into a mystery/crime plot, this is the book for you.