I’m honestly feeling pretty neutral about this book. I really like to go in completely blind when starting a new book.

If you’re that person, stop reading now.

The Escape room focuses on 4 high profile investors, who are invited to an escape room challenge as a team building expertise. There are additional characters that bring depth to the story, and play a pretty large role in the events that transpire leading up to and during the challenge.

The Escape Room is told from two POV’s, “The Elevator” and “Sara Hall”, and while this is normally my favorite style to read I struggled a little with it this time. “The Elevator” chapters are in third person, and “Sara Hall” in first. Third person is very difficult to write, and I don’t feel like it was executed well here.

For me, a good third person focuses on one person and their thoughts/feelings actions etc. but Megan Goldin was bopping around between the colleagues, sometimes in the same paragraph, and it was a little hard to keep up with who we were focusing on.

That being said the story line is pretty well written, but pretty predictable. I had most of the big moments figured out pretty early on, which is always disappointing.

I was mildly entertained during the book, and I can’t say I hated it but I also didn’t love it. I have it 4 stars because it is well written, and intriguing. I couldn’t justify a 3 star rating, because there aren’t any serious issues. However, I probably wouldn’t read it again, and I definitely wouldn’t pay the $13+ for the kindle copy.

If you were really wanting to read this one, I’d request it from the local library! I

This book started out with a bang - or should I say a murder...
I really liked the first third of the book with the Escape Room challenge and the subtle clues that appeared. However, this story was interspersed with Sara's story and I had a hard time getting the storylines tied in. I did not care for the 4 people trapped in the elevator - too arrogant, too selfish, greedy, ruthless, and shallow. I wanted to read more of Sara's story and how she came to the company and balanced the care for her parents and the demands of her fiancée. And Lucy - what a strange character to include in this story.... and while she was an important character, was actually on the outer fringes of the plot.
By the middle of the book, I was bored with the people in the elevator and wondered why they didn't smother, otherwise most of the action there was predictable. I felt there was too much background information that was not relevant to the challenge or the story as a whole.
I guessed the ending about 2/3 of the way through the book and was disappointed in the way it wrapped up and thought the ending was far fetched.
Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin's Press for providing me with an advanced reader's copy of this book

This is a "who done it" mixed with a "why they did it", spun in a unique manner in which we aren't sure whose responsible for the crime, even as we piece the backstory together. Many other reviews will fill in the plot points, but the big takeaway from this review is that the author does a fine job weaving 2 story lines together and leaves a hint of suspence every time the plot jumps to the alternating plot line. My biggest compliment is I will be looking for her next book and will surely read it when it comes out. This is a fine addition to the thriller genre.

Everyone I've talked to really loved this book, so I'm in the minority. I didn't like it. I felt like the plot was all over the place and it didn't make much sense to me. My e-galley had formatting issues so that might have contributed to my confusion. I really am glad that everyone else liked it so much! It just wasn't for me, I guess.

At the heart of The Escape Room is Sara Hall. In a compelling first-person narrative, Sara relates her experiences at Stanhope and Sons. She is hired shortly after completing her MBA summa cum laude, but not from an ivy league school. And that leaves her scrambling despite her grades, excellent references, and successful completion of an internship. But she survives the rigorous interview process and lands the job. During the new employee orientation, the firm's message is clear. Money is what counts. And soon Sara is making a lot of money, but without having a life.

Sara's narrative alternatives with a third-person moment-by-moment description of what transpires in the elevator. Vincent is the manipulative team leader who initially attempts to reassure his three subordinate employees that the exercise will last only one hour, at the end of which they will all be released whether they have solved the riddles presented to them or not. An hour elapses during which hot air blasts into the elevator in which a screen lights up with messages and clues. The door cannot be opened, there is no way to escape the influx of suffocatingly hot air, and the participants' cell phone batteries are being drained as they use the flashlight apps to illuminate their surroundings. One hour turns into many hours, as the clues become more troubling and their fear more pronounced.

Sam Bradley has served as Sara's mentor over lengthy, expensive lunches. He wanted to be a human rights lawyer, but has over time transformed into a cynic, sacrificing his ideals and values in the name of making money. He knows that he has become a slave to his demanding wife, Kim, as well as his own ego. And he is going to miss the flight to Antigua that Kim has made "a test of his commitment to their marriage." Sylvie is enmeshed in an affair with a married man who has made it clear that if she fails to meet him in Paris their relationship will be over. She is beautiful, stylish, and has learned to navigate a male-dominated profession by perpetually displaying an expression "a few degrees short of a resting bitch face." She is not a friend to other women. Jules is an alcoholic whose job performance has declined as a result of his drinking. All four of them are aware that the firm is considering layoffs due to recent failures to cement critical deals. They are all aware that they have "red targets on their backs" and, accordingly, not appearing when summoned for the escape room exercise was not an option.

As the hours drag on, revelations of secret machinations, betrayals, and resentments ratchet up the tension and potential for dire consequences in the elevator. The mystery at the heart of the characters' dilemma? Who has ordered them there and why? Are they going to be released? Or is the mastermind behind the deadly game determined to eliminate the players?

Sara is an empathetic character -- idealistic and committed to her career. Close to her parents, her desire to succeed is motivated not only by her own ego. Her father has been ill for many years and her earnings make it possible for her to ensure that his medical costs are covered, as well as care for her mother. Sara describes the friendship she develops with Lucy, a brilliant member of the team who is mentored and protected by Vincent. He tells Sara that she is "on the spectrum" and "awkward in social situations." But the two women develop a camaraderie as Sara comes to realize that Lucy is "the most sincere person in the entire team" which "said more about the team than about her." Goldin credibly and heartbreakingly demonstrates the evolution of their friendship and its profound impact upon several characters, primarily Sara.

The Escape Room is engrossing and clever. Aside from Sara and Lucy, Goldin's characters are despicable and morally bankrupt. She explains how some of them devolved to their current loathsome state, and challenges her readers to consider whether they can or should be redeemed -- if they survive. The story is replete with shocking revelations about the characters' behave that explain and inform their circumstances. It is a captivating mystery, but it is also a savvy exploration of the characters' relationships, alliances, and motivations that have delivered them to the challenge they must face together. <em>The Escape Room</em> is an unvarnished, unapologetic indictment of the misogyny and sexism that still permeate American workplaces, and a morality tale about greed, competitiveness, and an obsession with success . . . at any cost.

The pace of The Escape Room is unrelenting. The jaw-dropping conclusion may likely disappoint readers Goldin skillfully convinces to emotionally invest in her characters and their well-being, but it is undeniably inventive and, on some levels, deeply satisfying. There are many themes worthy of discussion which makes The Escape Room an excellent choice for book clubs. It has already been deemed one of the best books of 2019 for good reason, and bodes well for readers anxious to read more from Goldin, a talented and provocative new voice in fiction.

I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, all opinions and comments are my own.You can receive your copy here:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J4LQFK5/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1  

I want to start my review out by saying that I read everything with words, all books, but horror and thrillers are generally not what I read. My life is scary enough, I do not need to read about this stuff. I read this book while I was on a beach in Honduras on vacation, nice and relaxing..or so I thought. This book had my heart racing and I was OMGing and Holy crapping in more than one language. I was not prepared for this book. I was thinking it was going to be a nice, relaxing book to enjoy on the beach, but this had me all over the place with emotions, which is a sign of an amazing author!
We begin with someone calling 9-1-1 at 4:017 a.m. This is quite the beginning to a story! We are then taken back in time 34 hours earlier to the scene before the crime. A group of fellow employees are called to an out of the way office building in the South Bronx or a last minute meeting on a Friday night. They were all paranoid that they were called to this meeting to have their careers assassinated silently.  They are all upset when the boss runs in late to the meeting to ask who has done an escape room challenge before. They had delayed business trips, vacations, etc. to attend this meeting to only be meeting for an escape room. Are you kidding? These people make more an hour than I do in a week and this guy wants to play a game for team building.  They reflect on how they all got hired by this wonderful man and the things that have occurred throughout their journeys with the firm. Secrets are unveiled, unseemly things that occurred. These occurrences made my mouth drop, but then again, I worked for the Big banks, so it wasn't exactly surprising, but it still made my mouth drop and made me on the edge of my seat waiting for more and waiting for the entire story to unfold. I could NOT believe how calculating this book was with all the twists and turns. I did NOT expect how it turned out and with not wanting to spoil anything, I will go no further. I was on the edge of my seat throughout this book and was reading while I was standing in the sand getting my feet wet, reading while on the bus, I was locked into this book like you cannot believe. I read it cover to cover in one day, but the review was something in itself. It is hard not to talk about too much of this book without giving stuff away. I will say that it was amazing since I could not put it down. I will also say that never once in the book did I see anything coming.

What an interesting story! Lots of twists and turns throughout to keep my interest. I enjoyed this book!

This was a great read. I was a little confused at the start, but as soon as I righted myself it was a page turner. It shows how cut throat some jobs are and how weaker and smarter people can be bullied. However, revenge is the best medicine. Bravo. Thank you NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and Megan Gold in for the ARC to review.

Author : Megan Goldin
The Escape Room:
361 pages
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Pub. Date: July 30, 2019
2 ⭐⭐

The Escape Room by author Megan Goldin is a story of power, greed, murder, and revenge within a group of wall street brokers. Four competitive people enter an elevator believing that it is a team building activity, but it is instead revenge.

I am one of the few who did not care much for this book. It just was not gripping for me. I did not find any of the characters to be likable at all . This book is told in two points of views. It goes back and forth from the POV of the four members of the team who are trapped in the elevator to Sara Hall who tells us how everything came to this point. For me it was just way to unrealistic, and the story line dragged. Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for this ARC. Opinions are my own.

the elevator pitch:

Too much on the nose for this one!

Read/Skip:


READ: I can't decide if Escape Room is timely or old fashioned. On the one hand, it is a Wallstreet/Gordon Gekko type of story. Sara Hall comes from a modest, hard-working family. By impressing the top dog at a law firm, she is granted access to a world of wealth, privileged, cut-throat competition, and eventually the unavoidable corruption.

On the other side, if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would get a Netflix deal, this could be their first fiction project. And maybe time is a flat circle. Eighties gaudy excess is still resonant, look who sits in the White House.
Escape Room is a high concept thriller. Four people are trapped in an elevator, they think it is a corporate team-building exercise, but it's clearly not a game. It starts strong, cinematic, but the story gets thinner towards the end. Escape Room is a read-before-falling-asleep thriller. Compelling enough to keep you alert, but it will not force you to stay up. Bonus: even if you are groggy, you can easily follow along. And notwithstanding alluding to the 1 percent, it will not stress you out. Escape Room is pure escapist revenge fantasy.

The story:

Sara Hall Is getting desperate. Her degree doesn't open any doors; she is left waitressing at a shabby restaurant. After a disastrous interview, and an accidental run-in with the top dog at the same Wallstreet firm she's offered the keys to the kingdom. But only if she gives up everything: her time, her family, her best friend, and eventually her life.
After her death, someone will have to pay.

St. Martin's Press and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of The Escape Room. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

Four colleagues find themselves trapped in an elevator, unwilling participants in an extreme game of escape the room. As they work through the clues, will certain realizations about their work and private lives lead to drastic decisions by the group? Can the past truly come back to haunt and destroy?

The multiple perspective format lends itself well to the story, as it keeps the reader off balance and guessing. As the past unfolds, the story changes. Truth has a way of coming out and the author does a good job of dealing out the details a little at a time. The backstory, so crucial to the eventual outcome, was a bit rushed through. Readers are not really given fully developed characters, and instead are treated to a psychological thriller with fast paced action. Without getting into too much detail and ruining the novel for new readers, I can only say that I was disappointed in the ending and in the character development.

I read this book in one day as I was traveling to my honeymoon-I absolutely couldn't put it down.
This story is told in two timelines: we follow a group of financial analysts as they're roped into doing a last-minute escape room challenge, supposedly for a team building exercise. It doesn't take them long to figure out that this isn't quite the case. The other timeline we follow is of a girl named Sara Hall, who was once a colleague of those financial analysts, and we see her time working with them from start to finish.

I have to say, I wish this book wasn't marketed as an 'escape room' book. I went in thinking it was going to be a group of people trying to survive deadly escape rooms, but that wasn't the case. The 'escape room' element was very small-in reality they're just trapped in an elevator for most of the book, and they're just given a few clues that just serve to pit them against each other. So, in this aspect, I was let down by this book.

But that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I thought this was an incredibly gripping, fast paced story about the secret lives of wall street workers. I loved getting to know all of the characters, and I loved how they were all such morally gray characters. I just wish this book had been marketed differently. As a mystery/thriller, this book was fantastic. The mystery of how the two timelines fit together, and what really was going on in this secretive financial group was so, so gripping. I very much enjoyed my time reading this.

Megan Goldin's writing was also great. I was so impressed that this was her debut novel! I can't wait to read all of her future books.

I am definitely in the minority of this one, but I didn’t love it. I felt the writing style felt stilted and awkward, and it was fairly predictable. The premise was amazing, and I was so excited to read it. But the execution fell flat. Everyone has different taste in thrillers, but for me this one just didn’t live up to the hype at all.

But, I did like how it focused so much on character development. And some of the elevator scenes were so strongly written and stuck with me. It was good enough for me to want to finish and see how it ended, but not one I loved or would recommend to my friends. But again, I seem to be in the minority here!

Thank you so much to the publisher and Netgalley for a free digital copy.

I liked this book but I was able to put it down...for at least a week before going back to it. The story was interesting but I felt that I knew what was happening the whole time. Also, I did not have much invested in any of the characters. They all seemed pretty spoiled to me.
Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for this ARC.

While almost everyone dreams of a chance to get even, one way or another, I would imagine very few dream of carrying it grand scale tin this book. Escape rooms are currently very popular, but are maybe not the best location for a team building exercise for a group of highly competitive adversaries. A page-turner to the very end..

The Escape Room deals with taking a few co-workers and sticking them together in an elevator for a "game". They think it's a team building exercise. What they don't know is that this game will bring out dark secrets from each one, dark enough to want to kill them. And the biggest secret/question of them all, "What happened to Sara Hall?"

This book is told in two points of views. We have a third POV for the elevator scenes and then we have Sara's POV. Sara is a woman who knows she wants to work somewhere where she can get lots of money and be set for life. Her opportunity comes to work at Stanhope. What she doesn't know is that this place consumes you. It won't leave you any time for yourself. You're expected to work 365 days a year, to miss birthdays, miss a birth, anything.

Sara was so different from her colleagues. She didn't view Stanhope as the all and all. I loved being inside her head and seeing things from her perspective, which was so different than everyone else's. She was friendly, she cared. Stanhope hadn't completely taken a hold of her life... Yet.

If I keep talking, I'll spoil everything. This is one of those novels you have to go in blank. I will say that I loved reading about each character and why those specific characters ended in the elevator. I also loved that the author talked about discrimination in the work place towards women, as well as being unfair with the wages that each worker gets.

The Escape Room is an ingenious, sharp and clever mystery. I do wish the ending had been more... Complete? I can't say much or again, I will spoil everything. Despite the ending, I recommend this unrealistic, yet highly entertaining novel.

Believable? Probably not. Entertaining? ABSOLUTLEY!
I don't typically read a bunch of thrillers or mystery novels because I always feel like they are the same and predictable. The Escape Room was one of the best thrillers I read because it's not that it wasn't predictable, or anything like that, but it was just very entertaining to read. The characters, the problems, just everything about this novel was fun, juicy, and captivating in a way. Outstanding in my mind for keeping a reader glued to the pages.

What a gripping suspenseful novel. I kept the pages turning into the night as I had to find out if they all escaped the elevator. A definite surprise ending. I can’t wait to read more from Megan Goldin.

Her debut novel was a success - The Escape Room by Megan Goldin is such a compelling read. Even though through the prologue we are given a glimpse into how the "escape room", I mean elevator plays out, I couldn't wait to see how the story ends. I found the main characters to be very unlikable and was annoyed at the times it would return to them present day in the elevator. The best part of the novel were the parts that involved the past and the story line of Sara Hall and watching as her revenge fantasy plays out. If you want a highly entertaining read with a few plot twists then add The Escape Room to your list. I look forward to reading more from Megan Goldin.

Thank you St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book for my honest review.

The Escape Room teases you along nicely as it alternates chapters between four corporate douches evidently trapped in an escape room/elevator, and Sara, a young woman starting a job at a high-powered investment firm. The pieces slowly fall into place as we come to see the extent of the nefariousness and greed of certain people in the story. It's a fun ride, a quick read. It took me back to my days in the banking world in NYC, but thankfully never working with sharks like these!