I had basically been interested in reading Hide by Kiersten White since Del Rey first announced it, a deadly competition set in an abandoned amusement park? That was definitely enough to catch my attention!
Then… Squid Game came out on Netflix, I fell in love with the show and Hide was comped to it. Unsurprisingly, I loved Hide.
My full review can be found below!
About the Book
Title: Hide
Author: Kiersten White
Publisher: Del Rey Books
Release Date: May 24th 2022
Pages: 256
Source: ARC gifted by the publisher (this in no way affects my review which is honest and unbiased)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis
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.
A high-stakes hide-and-seek competition turns deadly in this dark supernatural thriller from New York Times bestselling author Kiersten White.
Review
Hide starts off with a family visiting the amusement park when it was still open, in just two pages Kiersten leaves you wanting answers to a mystery and makes it so that you have to read on. Then we’re introduced to Mack, the main character and someone you can’t help but feel for from the beginning as she’s living from shelter to shelter and suffering with severe PTSD due to her past.
Someone then invites Mack to partake in a hide-and-seek competition, where the prize is $50,000 for winning against thirteen other competitors. Mack’s hidden for her life before, so she thinks it’ll be easy to do this time, she just has to make sure that she cares for no one and no one cares for her.
A mere 14 pages in and Mack is already on a bus with the other contestants, and even more quickly we’re introduced to Ava, a seriously awesome army veteran. Ava struggles with PTSD also, and each contestant seemingly would hugely benefit from the prize money, making the odds even higher.
As things get more and more intense in the park, Mack can’t help but start to break her own rule of not getting close to others. She’s basically spent her life hiding since the incident, and prefers that no one knows who she is. Watching her character grow was probably my favourite thing about Hide, but simultaneously as the reader we see increasing hints of the supernatural within the park. It’s definitely a dark book, in terms of age I’d say it’s more “new adult”, with quite a lot of gore and not really any smut (but cuteness in parts).
At its core, White has written a story about the unfairness of life, and it’s about how getting closer to others can make things seem a little easier.
This was the first book I read by Kiersten, and it’s definitely made me more interested to read her older books!
‘The bus bumps along the deep tunnel of night, sealing in fourteen dreamers against the world.’
Have you read this yet?
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