James' Game — Sean O'Neil

Blood and belonging are as old as the human species itself. The words themselves bring out a variety of emotions spanning the full human genome. In James's Game, James takes on the concept by looking at the role of success in life and the importance of being born into the right family genetics as opposed to being put through the right system.The book also looks at the effects of personal cultural connections and an individual's family history. Even today, as we look around the world, we still see caste or class systems in various parts of the world. Even where it isn't a formal structure, in many cases, it still exists informally. While written or unwritten, the end result is the grouping of humans simply by birthplace and family lineage.The story in James's Game uses the old British system of elite families as the backdrop and is seen through the eyes of three adopted children, one from Ireland, one from Africa, and one from China. It speaks to the mistaken value, in my opinion, of success and prestige at the expense of life's more important values. In James's case, because of his background, he desperately needs to prove the British nobility wrong and that any child, put through the right system, can succeed as well as any of those children from the British elites that he so despises. Welcome to James's Game.