My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Goodreads rating: 3.75 with 803 ratings (as of 5/24/2022)

The challenge: spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don’t get caught.

The prize: enough money to change everything.

Even though everyone is desperate to win–to seize their dream futures or escape their haunting pasts–Mack feels sure that she can beat her competitors. All she has to do is hide, and she’s an expert at that.

It’s the reason she’s alive, and her family isn’t.

But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes this competition is more sinister than even she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive.

Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide, but nowhere to run.

Come out, come out, wherever you are. …Synopsis from Goodreads

200-Word Review

I was provided with a complimentary copy of this book so I could give an honest review. The opinions are entirely my own, and any quotes are taken from the ARC and may be different in the final published copy.

A fun week-long competition playing hide-and-seek where the winner gets $50,000 sounds too good to be true. That’s because it is. For Kiersten White’s latest novel, Hide, she came up with the concept of a hide-and-seek contest by basing it on a real competition. The real contest has rules and safety measures in place. White’s game is set in an abandoned amusement park where not everyone will make it out alive.

White said she did not want this to be a YA book but a horror novel. She succeeded in her goal.

Each chapter covers one whole day of the competition. Doing so made all of the chapters much longer than in most novels, but it is an interesting way to define the passage of time. The book is a quick and easy read. I found myself reading it in one sitting because I did not want to put it down.

The development of the characters allows you to root for a favorite and decide who you want off the island next. The setting completes the ambiance and adds to the horror story.

I have not read Kiersten White’s other stories but added them high up on my to-be-read list.

This review was published on Philomathinphila.com, Smashbomb, Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble on 5/24/22. When available, the review will be published on Scribd.com and, using Overdrive, will be rated in 9 libraries.

Genre: Horror, Thriller, Fiction
Print Length: 256 pages
ISBN: 9780593359235
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Del Rey
Publication Date: May 24, 2022

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