Title: HideAuthor: Kiersten White
First Published: May 24, 2022
Publisher: Del Rey
Pages: 256
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Format: eARC, Hardcover
Source: Gift, NetGalley
Rating:
Synopsis:
A high-stakes hide-and-seek competition turns deadly in this dark supernatural thriller from New York Times bestselling author Kiersten White.
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 a dream future or escape a haunting past—Mack is sure 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 that this competition is even more sinister than 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.
Buy the Book: AmazonReview
Hide is easily one of my most anticipated reads this year, and it did not disappoint. A sweltering hide-and-seek game in an abandoned theme park with a supernatural horror twist, it is the perfect thrill ride for the summer season.
Hide is a character-driven social horror with a large cast of characters. It was hard initially for me to keep up with all of the characters and I found it helpful to take notes. I appreciated the amount of detail given to each of the characters, even the ones that you can tell are less important, with enough information to learn about them but not so much that it slows down the novel. The narrative constantly shifts between characters, even mid-paragraph, which kept the pacing snappy. The plot is filled to the brim with commentary about privilege and wealth inequality, and while it was at times extremely heavy-handed, I appreciated it regardless.
It takes a while for the story to really start moving but the second half of the novel was just so imaginative and wild that I couldn’t get enough. The ending was killer, I loved it and I honestly laughed out loud reading the last line. This book feels like a summer blockbuster film, and although it is categorized as an adult novel I think it would be an easy bridge for YA readers.
Also notable is the official playlist for Hide, which is available on Spotify, the songs are great and fit the tone and feel of the novel perfectly. Lastly, a massive warning to potential readers, avoid reviews of this book! I glanced at a review and inadvertently had an important part of the plot spoiled for me which was a serious bummer. A surprising number of reviews I’ve seen drop a huge spoiler that will ruin some of the mystery in the novel. This book gets pretty wild, so it is a good one to go in as blind as possible.
Quote
“Like little kids, playing hide-and-seek. If they can’t see the monster, it can’t see them. But it can. It always can..”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Kiersten White
Kiersten White is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning, and critically acclaimed author of many books, including the And I Darken trilogy, the Sinister Summer series, the Camelot Rising trilogy, and her upcoming adult debut, Hide. Her books have been published in over twenty territories, and her novel The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein is currently in development with Sony Pictures Television.
Kiersten lives with her family in San Diego, where she can regularly be found pressing her hands against the glass of her back door, furtively whispering I love you to her deeply ambivalent tortoise, Kimberly.
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