The Heirs – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: Prodigy Heirs Dysfunctional Family Murder.
YA book title: The Heirs.
YA author: Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé.
Genre: Murder mystery.
Published by: Usborne.
ISBN: 9781835401002.
Recommended for children aged: 14+.
First published: Paperback June 2026.
This YA book is ideal for: A highly dysfunctional family finds itself in the middle of a shocking and gripping murder mystery. A brief exploration into the nature vs nurture debate, power and status, and morality.
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Our review:
The Heirs consists of a unique and gripping plotline based around the highly dysfunctional Button family. Billionaire Leontes Button adopted five babies from around the globe with the aim of raising them as prodigies: Bilal, Fola, Octavius, Perdita and Romeo. Each child is raised within a specialism chosen in infancy and, as the story progresses, the reader discovers more about how the life of each child has unfolded. Early in the narrative, it is revealed that Leontes has been murdered. His children are now in their late teens, and a police investigation is quickly launched.
The timeline of the story jumps backwards and forwards in time, carefully revealing expertly woven clues relating to the murder and also to other events in the lives of the five siblings. This creates a great opportunity for exploring non-chronological storytelling, and once you know the resolution, you can go back and notice any clues that you may have missed the first time.
Key themes to explore are power, morals, parenting styles, nature vs nurture and family relationships. There are opportunities to compare this novel to classics with similar themes, for example, the outcomes of nature vs nurture in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or books involving atypical childhoods where children are raised separately from their biological parents, such as The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park or Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The constant presence of status and power dynamics in ‘The Heirs’ provides students with a chance to reflect on and discuss power dynamics in their own lives, in the wider world and in other works of literature, for example, Animal Farm by George Orwell. It is very clear as the story unfolds that power and wealth are portrayed as protective factors, and although the five siblings began life in challenging situations with no power and no wealth at all, as they have grown up, they have enjoyed certain privileges that are not available to most people. The complexity is that they have also endured certain restrictions and requirements that others have not.
The sibling dynamics of the Button heirs (as the public often refers to them) evolve and are tested at many points in the story, creating opportunities for debates around morals and responsibilities. Their relationships with those outside of the family are mostly strained and often dysfunctional, which leads back into discussions around the parenting styles and priorities of their father. Plenty of morally ambiguous or questionable moments arise within these interactions, with the different characters’ power and status also at play. Each of these provides excellent opportunities to practise debate and discussion with older literature pupils, as well as reflecting on the place of literature itself within moral instruction and how this has evolved throughout history.
The Heirs will be published on 4 June 202,6 and whether you are an older teen, young adult or a not-so-young adult, I recommend getting your hands on a copy.
Many thanks to Usborne for the review copy.
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