Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

American author Jennifer Lynn Barnes is a scholar and educator, as well as a prolific author of young adult literature. Barnes published her first book, Golden, in 2006, when she was 19 years old. She continued writing and publishing novels while completing a doctoral degree in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science. She is most famous for her The Naturals series (2013-2017) and her Inheritance Games series, which comprises five books to date. Her work has earned critical acclaim and gained popularity in the young adult thriller and romance genres.

Barnes explicitly draws from her work on the psychology of fiction to write her novels. Explaining the connection between her research and her writing, Barnes states, “I’ve always been interested in how the mind works and how people work. I think there are a lot of parallels between psychology, writing, and reading, right? They’re all about getting inside other people’s heads” (“Interview: Jennifer Lynn Barnes.” S., Ava. BookPeople’s Teen Press Corps, 21 Jan. 2023). The protagonists in The Naturals series, for example, were inspired by theory of mind, a psychological concept that describes an individual’s ability to understand other people’s subjectivity. Barnes extrapolated on the concept and made “each of the Naturals […] one in a billion, very, very top percentile at some aspect of theory of mind. So there’s an emotion reader, there’s a deception detector, there are a couple profilers, and then as you read the books, it’s actually teaching the psychological science of doing all of those things” (“Speaking of Psychology: How to Use Psychology to Write a Best Seller, with Jennifer Lynn Barnes, PhD.” American Psychological Association, June 2024). This imbues the Naturals series with a degree of realism despite its highly fictionalized premise.

The series also borrows elements from popular media to ground itself in the thriller genre. For example, American TV crime shows, most notably the Criminal Minds franchise, popularized the term “UNSUB” (or “unknown subject). The narrative structure, which alternates between Cassie’s point of view and the killer’s, is also typical of the crime literature genre, such as Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (1986). This enhances mystery and intrigue by creating opportunities for narrative plot twists, red herrings, and unreliable narration.