65 pages • 2 hours read
Jennifer Lynn BarnesThe Brothers Hawthorne
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Many Meanings of Family Loyalty
In The Brothers Hawthorne, there are four key families: the Hawthornes, Blakes, Graysons, and Johnstone-Jamesons, with crossovers between them. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, through these four families, explores the different ways family loyalty is cultivated and the outcomes of that loyalty, both in biological and found families.
In biological families, there can be an expectation of loyalty; Barnes demonstrates ways that expectation is upheld and discarded through Sheffield Grayson’s relationships with Grayson and Colin, and through Jameson’s relationship with the two sides of his family tree. In the first three books, Sheffield Grayson’s reason for attacking Avery Grambs is that he believes her to be the biological daughter of Toby Hawthorne, whom he blames for his nephew Colin’s death. He continues to bring Colin’s mom, Kim Wright, money after Colin’s death to help her, but he doesn’t introduce her to his twin daughters. Savannah sums up the difference between Sheffield’s loyalty to Colin and his relationship with his other children: “Our dad loved Colin. Maybe he loved us, too, but we weren’t Colin” (302). Grayson notes that the only time Sheffield refers to him as his son is in the secret journal, the day he kissed Avery: “Toby Hawthorne’s daughter, he’d written, doesn’t get to kiss my son [...] He’d called me his son. No quotation marks. No dismissal. Nothing but possession and fury” (374). The words possession and fury highlight how expected biological family loyalty can be twisted when it’s not based in love. By contrast, Acacia Grayson would have immediately welcomed Grayson into her family had she known about him when he was younger: “I would like to think that if I had known earlier, I could have influenced Sheff to do the right thing [...] I would like to believe [...] that I’m the kind of person who would never hold a child responsible for the actions of his parents” (93). When Grayson found out he had sisters—Savannah and Gigi—he arranged for their protection out of a sense of family loyalty. Grayson and Savannah use the phrase family first to defend their actions, secrets, and decisions. Similarly, Simon Johnstone-Jameson (Branford) immediately assumes family responsibility for Jameson once he learns of his existence: “I’m the head of this family in every way that matters. Ian [Jameson’s father] may shirk his responsibilities, but I do not” (399). For Simon, the fact that Jameson is a blood relative automatically entitles him to Simon’s loyalty and support. The outcome of Sheffield’s twisted and inconsistent family loyalty is death, whereas Grayson and Simon’s love-based sense of duty saves both their families.
Avery Grambs, as a character not biologically related to any of the key families, is a vehicle for exploring loyalty in found-family dynamics. Romantic love is one form of found family: Jameson chooses Avery over his secrets (“Trusting her. Trusting himself. It was all the same” [463]). Tobias Hawthorne chose Avery to inherit his fortune because of the love his brother Toby still held for Avery’s mom. In the opening of the novel, Nash proposes marriage to Avery’s sister, Libby, prompting Grayson's internal struggle with love and trust. Platonic love, like that between Avery and Grayson, holds just as much narrative weight in The Brothers Hawthorne. Though Grayson acts as if his trust issues are primarily about romantic love, Nash points out, “your broken heart—right here, right now [...] That’s not about romance. It’s about family. It’s about you being scared that if you let someone in [...] they’re going to leave you. And you can’t let that happen, so you leave first” (435). Grayson’s first step toward reconciling with his sisters is reconciling with Avery, “She’d told him once that they were family. Maybe a part of him had been running from that too” (437). The found-family dynamic between Avery and Grayson leads each to protect the other. There’s no difference between the actions the Hawthornes take in support of Avery and the ones they take in support of each other; through these relationships, Barnes equates found family to biological family. Just as biological family loyalty can be twisted, so can found-family loyalty, as demonstrated by the Proprietor’s relationship to Rohan, the Factotum. The Proprietor presumably saved Rohan from some worse fate, but it’s clear that Rohan is loyal to the Proprietor out of fear and what the Proprietor can provide, rather than a positive emotional connection. This dynamic is exemplified in how the Proprietor forces Rohan to fight in the ring and in how the Proprietor secretly invites Zella to participate in the Game for a chance at inheriting the Devil’s Mercy instead of Rohan. The expectation of loyalty in response to basic care—food, clothes, shelter—is not limited to biological family.
Barnes uses the character arcs of Grayson and Jameson to set examples of family loyalty against one another; the foils created through this narrative strategy offer different perspectives on family loyalty in both biological and found families. Ultimately, Barnes invites the reader to consider how loyalty separate from love in any circumstance leads to negative outcomes.
How Gender and Class Affect Family Dynamics
Jennifer Lynn Barnes sets the experiences of the female characters—Zella, Gigi, Savannah, and Eve—against the male characters—the Hawthorne brothers and the Johnstone-Jameson brothers—to reveal how gender affects social status and wealth. The female characters fight low expectations, and when they achieve high status, they are regularly challenged or threatened. Male characters manipulate female characters or act as gatekeepers to social status.
Wealthy male characters manipulate female characters into positions of lower status as a form of control, and some female characters respond by subverting that control. Gigi and Savannah both live in the shadow of their cousin, Colin, who’d been like a son to Sheffield Grayson. His desire to avenge Colin’s death motivated his attempts on Avery Grambs’s life. Gigi changed her disposition to incur her father’s favor:
I remember being three years old and knowing that my dad loved me…and that he especially loved the way I looked [...] because I looked like Colin [...] and as long as I was happy and bubbly and just a silly little girl who didn’t try to matter too much, that was a good thing (454).
Savannah changed the way she dressed as a response to her dad’s expectations of her:
Basketball was always our thing, but when I hit middle school, I noticed that he stopped saying that I played basketball and started saying that I played on the girls’ basketball team [...] He started asking me why I was such a tomboy (302).
Eve, despite being named her great-grandfather’s heir, still must work for his approval: “I have to prove myself every day [...] knowing that if I fail, he’ll take the seals from me one by one, and I’ll be left with nothing” (268). Gigi is an example of subverting this control, as she uses the way others underestimate her to accomplish her goals and position herself as Savannah’s protector at the end of the novel. Savannah and Eve are unable to subvert expectations by the novel’s end; Eve assumes her position as the heir of the Blake fortune, at the cost of her relationships, and Savannah is left in the dark about her father’s role in Avery’s kidnapping. These three young women are all heirs to a fortune, just as the Hawthorne brothers had been raised, but they were either underestimated or manipulated by the male authority figures in their lives, and their inheritance was tightly controlled. Where the Hawthorne brothers had been cultivated, encouraged, and entitled as children, Gigi, Savannah, and Eve were all restrained from accessing power or wealth.
By contrast, Zella and Avery represent female power within male-dominated hierarchies, characterized by cunning and relationship-building. Zella, as a Black female duchess, is not given an invitation to the Devil’s Mercy, but she earns one by stealing her way into this supposedly secret and controlled space. Zella’s presence at the Mercy symbolizes her critique of Jameson: “‘The world is kindest, of course,’ Zella continued, her voice steely now, ‘to rich white boys, regardless of whether or not they deserve to win’” (404). Zella positions herself as someone who deserves to win, as opposed to the Johnstone-Jameson brothers, who are less intelligent and more entitled. Similarly, Avery recognizes that Ian Johnstone-Jameson has used her as a pawn; he only approaches Jameson as his entrant to the Game because he knows Avery will accompany him. Avery, however, enters the competition for her own purposes. Both characters subvert the positions and expectations placed on them because of their gender, and the tentative alliance between them symbolizes the power of solidarity for women in male-dominated spaces.
While the male characters exist in family units—the Hawthorne brothers and the Johnstone-Jameson brothers—the female characters are often isolated. Though Acacia, Gigi, and Savannah are a family unit, the decisions each has made in response to male authority have alienated them from one another: Acacia’s acceptance of Sheffield’s adultery causes a split between her and Savannah, Savannah’s cold exterior sets her apart from her sister, and Gigi’s decision to keep secrets from Savannah at the end of the novel creates an emotional barrier that Eve plans to manipulate in the sequel. Eve, Zella, and Avery all exist in male-dominated spaces and are often the only women in the room. The author contrasts the familial unity between the male characters with the isolation experienced by the female characters to highlight how societal expectations often place women at odds with one another. This theme culminates in the final line of the book, “Alice Hawthorne is alive” (463), suggesting that this woman’s existence puts Avery’s life at risk.
The Long-Term Effects of Emotional Suppression
The Brothers Hawthorne is written from the alternating points of view of family protector Grayson Hawthorne and risk-embracing Jameson Hawthorne. Through this structure, Jennifer Lynn Barnes sets Jameson and Grayson against one another not only as foils but as two sides of the same coin. Jameson and Grayson each demonstrate the long-term effects of emotional suppression; through their character arcs, the author presents their journeys to embracing and navigating emotions in a healthier way.
Grayson Hawthorne characterizes himself as a protector: “Protecting things that mattered was what Grayson Hawthorne did, even when he couldn’t afford to let them matter too much” (20). He believes that when he loves someone wholly—as he did with Emily—he puts them in danger, either from himself or from his decisions. Jameson Hawthorne, to protect himself from pain, often denies how events or people affect him, saying, “Nothing matters unless you let it” (33). His denial is most prominent in his refusal to admit how much his biological father’s approval matters to him. When his father reveals he came for Jameson to get to Avery, “[Jameson] refused to let that hurt” (59). Grayson suppresses his love while Jameson suppresses his pain; both brothers learned their maladaptive coping skills from their grandfather, Tobias Hawthorne. As described in one of the flashbacks, when Tobias Hawthorne caught the boys kissing Emily in the tree house, he told them, “[W]hen you love a woman or a man or anyone the way we love, there is no going back [...] anything less, and you’ll destroy her. And if she is the one [...] someday she’ll destroy you” (311-12). Coupled with Tobias Hawthorne’s description of poetry—“When words are real enough, when they’re the exact right words, when what you’re saying matters, when it’s beautiful and perfect and true—it hurts”—Grayson came to believe that expressed love only creates harm (52). Similarly, Jameson developed his belief that he can suppress any pain that gets in the way of his goals based on his grandfather’s critique, “When you have certain weaknesses [...] you have to want it more” (152). When Tobias first told Jameson that, Jameson ignored a broken arm to climb into the tree house as his grandfather urged, “Forget your arm. Ignore the pain” (152). Several years after that moment, Jameson has already developed his mantra—that pain won’t affect him unless he allows it—that he wields when Emily dies. Both brothers choose emotional suppression as a response to the negative repercussions they believe will result from their feelings, but through both the events of this novel and the first three novels in the series, the author demonstrates that this emotional suppression has led each of them into risky, isolating situations.
The turning point for each character in the novel comes when they finally reject emotional suppression in favor of emotional expression. Grayson uses his annual 911 to gather his brothers, explain the danger Savannah and Gigi are in, and explicitly declare that he wants to help them but he’s afraid of messing things up. Nash directly contradicts their grandfather's comments about how dangerous love can be by pointing out how Grayson has developed healthy and loving relationships with his brothers and can do so with others. Jameson, in saving Zella’s life in the Game, and asking for Vantage as his prize, explicitly demonstrates his values, risking emotional harm for the sake of honor and family, but not risking bodily harm, out of respect for Avery. When each brother is willing to embrace vulnerability rather than suppress fear, they not only rescue themselves from emotional turmoil but also save someone else’s life.
As a counterexample to Grayson and Jameson’s growth, the author explores how Sheffield Grayson’s emotional suppression led to his death, and to negative outcomes for Avery, the twins, Acacia, and Grayson. As Grayson reads through Sheffield’s decoded journal, he sees that Sheffield wrote down feelings that he did not express out loud and surmises, “Sheffield Grayson hadn’t been burdened. He’d been angry” (371). Sheffield’s unprocessed grief over his nephew Colin led him to pursue revenge against Avery, disown Grayson, and neglect his daughters and wife. Ultimately, Sheffield’s attempt on Avery’s life leads to his death and to ongoing strife for his surviving family. Read together, Grayson’s, Jameson’s, and Sheffield’s character arcs demonstrate the long-term negative impacts of emotional suppression and argue that healthy expression within a community can be a path toward healing.
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By Jennifer Lynn Barnes
