I enjoyed the suspense and thrills, appreciated that I was never genuinely scared, and was pleasantly surprised by the depth and complexity of the story’s main characters.

Also we didn’t even have POV shifts with chapters or any kind of announcement, you’d just be reading through pages from Mack’s POV at one point and then suddenly with no indication you’d be reading from Brandon’s POV.

The competitors include a wannabe influencer, a young man banished from his religious sect, a lesbian veteran, an underemployed striver, and a kindly gas station attendant. Please educate yourself on the content warnings for this novel before reading, as I may have missed some in my review. When I first read the synopsis of this book, I was of course immediately hooked by its dark and enticing premise, but I didn’t expect to be reduced to a puddle of tears at midnight on a Saturday night when I finally finished it, clutching my overly-annotated copy with shaking hands. 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.

They did so to protect themselves and their descendants from violence and poverty, and the sacrifices have worked: each family is prosperous and safe.Sometimes the dialog of said wealthy elites was a LITTLE on the nose (which was a bit surprising as this is marketed as an adult novel; I tend to expect more of that in YA, but hey, this is White’s first foray into adult audiences and perhaps some old habits die hard), but it was few and far between and never took me too far out of the story. If there had been slightly less characters and slightly more pages I think I could have been made to care a little bit more. There is a lot of telling in this novel and a lot of exposition that at times dragged but I feel if those moments were told through cinematic design, it would really heighten the intensity of those moments and create something truly spooktacular. It would have been helpful to even have a list of the contestants at the beginning so I could tell them apart.

Equal parts hell-ride thriller and American fable, Kiersten White's HIDE runs you through a sinister child's game set in a nightmare amusement park, and it does so with gleeful, fiendish delight. m. will be confiscated and thrown out, so they can’t even leave their meager possessions on the cot that is not theirs.When contestants begin to disappear and tragedy strikes those remaining, it is seeking that Mack must learn to be equally good at, if she is to discover what is really occurring and make it out alive. For example, how the park was described created an elaborate visual for me and I was able to use it to bounce from place to place as the story continued. You can read the book just for this, but there are also hidden layers as you learn more about the characters and the unwritten connections between them.

Just the thought of all those ramshackle rides, carousels with faded animals and rusted mechanics creaking menacingly, it’s too enticing. With realistic characters in an unfamiliar landscape and situation, White created an absolutely genius progression of fear. She had zero redeeming qualities and her megalomaniac persona portrayed in her journals made it so lovely to hate her and all the immediate family. Mack is suddenly aware of her hands—her bitten fingernails, her shiny burned palms, her ragged cuticles. The suspenseful plot combines elements of Thomas Tryon’s classic Harvest Home, Netflix’s Squid Game, and the social commentary of Jordan Peele’s film oeuvre and mixes these with a revelatory pacing reminiscent of Spielberg’s Jaws.

Mack is skilled at making herself invisible, having survived her father’s massacre of her family by hiding.