<i>The Perfect Escape</i> was a really rough one for me to get through, and probably would have ended up in my DNF pile if I didn't have to review it. The characters are enjoyable, but the plot is so unrealistic, especially when it comes to the ending. It may work well for very young, young adult readers, but I think older YA readers and adults who like to dip into the market are going to have a hard time accepting the premise and resolution of this book.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

I really enjoyed about the first 40% of this book. I especially loved Kate's character. i thought she was spunky and funny, and I wanted to know more about why she was so secretive about her home life. I thought the chemistry between she and Nate was kind of cute.

However, close to the halfway point of the book it seemed the plot sort of lost focus. The characters became a bit too angsty and kind of unlikeable for me. I get that Nate's parents were struggling but I thought it odd that they seemed to eat out a fair amount and his Xbox live subscription and new games were still a top priority for him. Not to mention all the valuable collectibles he hung on to and all of his activities and the fancy private school. Generally scholarships don't cover all expenses. It was hard to believe they were struggling as much as we were supposed to believe just because they had an old car, as opposed to Tesla, and chose to do home repairs themselves. I also thought Kate's motives were incredibly selfish and unbelievable. I mean her dad was definitely awful. But in a cartoonish, over the top way. The whole thing just stretched my suspension of disbelief a bit too far. I also thought the characters lost their wit and chemistry. I struggled to care what happened to them as the story went on.

Ultimately this book wasn't awesome or terrible, it was just fine.

A quick, cute read, with deep characters and a sweet romance at its heart. Laughed out loud more than a few times, which is always surprising (but wonderful!) Will definitely recommend to my rom-com loving students.

I have a personal policy that I will not post negative reviews for YA novels. If I cannot assign an honest 4-5 stars to a book, I don’t review it.

For me this was a 2-star read. If you want to know why, below are some of my reading notes that I jotted down as I read the book. Again, I will not be posting this as a review.

At 41% into this book I am increasingly disappointed that, though it's supposed to be a romantic comedy, I haven't found a single part of it that is funny. It is also not romantic as the main two characters have spent the entire time sweating from anxiety every time they are around each other, and they have zero sexual or emotional chemistry with each other.

The heroine is suffering from anxiety and depression ever since her mother died a year before. Her mother had pneumonia that was not treated soon enough because Kate’s horrible father told Kate’s mother that she was being weak and needed to tough it out when she first got sick. Then he left town for work and abandoned her, and by the time Kate took her to the hospital, it was too late. Ever since, her father has been constantly keeping Kate under surveillance via robots and a smart home that records her every action, and he regularly has the robot scan her body to see if she is getting sick. None of this is presented as Kate assuming dear old Dad deeply cares about keeping her safe because he is horrendously ashamed of how he treated his dead wife. Instead, Kate is plotting how to get enough money to escape from his Snidely Whiplash clutches. Nothing funny about any of that.

I keep waiting for Kate and Nate to get to the zombie contest and I'm 50% in and it hasn't happened yet.

Nate is handsome, brilliant, and athletic and skilled at martial arts and yet he is presented as an anxious dweeb who's never dated. It makes no sense and is not funny. Nate is Alpha Male hunk material, and he’s presented as a clueless doormat. Yes, some of his insecurity is motivated by the reality that his family is poor due to the fact that he is Korean American and his parents seem to be struggling, first generation immigrants. He is a scholarship student at a hugely expensive, snooty private school and bullied by many of the mean, rich kids there. His parents have also raised him to be blindly obedient, which is not conducive to learning how to be assertive in the face of hard knocks.

We don’t find out until very late in the book why Nate’s parents are having money problems—it is due to his father getting fired from what one would presume is a high-paid tech job. I am surprised that, as frugally as they live with his father doing all the home repairs and his mom driving an old car, and Nate not having his own car, that they haven’t saved a substantial cushion of money. In addition, Nate’s father has only very recently been fired and we are told they are in danger of foreclosure! That doesn’t happen in five minutes! You have to have missed at least three payments before the process even begins.

Speaking of Nate’s dad: we learn late in the book that Nate’s dad has been fired because of the machinations of Nate’s main villain, a privileged white guy at his school who wants to bribe him with $50,000 and intimidate him as well to get him to help the guy cheat on entrance exams to improve his chances of getting into an Ivy League university. One would presume, since it is this villain’s father who does the firing, that his father is in on the plot to have Nate help his son cheat. After the recent cheating scandals by famous parents to help their kids get into prestigious universities, this seems to be a risky move for both the bad buy and his dad.

In the midst of the subplot of Nate's family’s money problems, there is page after page, that reads like slice of life rather than a forward-moving plot, of his day-to-day life with his Korean parents. Then we get a scene where Nate’s obnoxious, bratty little sister (who is not funny) plays with one of his Star Wars collectable action figures that was worth $500 before little sis destroys it. Several things occurred to me that made no sense: Why doesn’t he lock up his valuables? How can his family be so poor and he manage to afford to buy expensive action figures? Why isn’t he putting that money toward his college fund? Why are his parents extremely strict with him but they seem to be letting his little sister run wild? Destroying property is a cardinal sin in any culture.

The book drags on in the boring middle…. There is no real sexual chemistry between these two characters. There is a huge amount of focus on boring day-to-day life for these characters. Nothing is funny.

It is not clear what school Kate goes to. Does she attend Nate’s school? If not, how do they end up at the same party, both of them coming separately, and both of them not on the guest list? Why would rich kids have a party at a ratty roller-skating rink? At the party, Nate alternates between not being able to skate well, and zooming over to help Kate up when she falls down. Inconsistent. Then the author brings in a girl he had a long-time crush on and he drops Kate and the starting of them warming up together for the insertion of an obnoxious romantic triangle. But, of course, we learn later, that’s so Nate can stupidly trust this girl twice so she can help the buffoonish cheater villain to betray Nate at the zombie adventure.

Multiple times in the book Kate states to herself that Nate means nothing to her, he's just a means to an end to when the $50,000 zombie contest so she can head to New York City to try to be an actress. That’s not romantic and it’s not funny.

The zombie apocalypse survival contest doesn't start until 60% of the book. Finally! It’s the main selling point of the book. This is the point in the plot where we are to believe that these two are finally falling in love.

The zombie adventure reads like a poor man's Hunger Games. There is no concern among the people running this disaster of a contast that participants are threatening each other with tasers and attacking each other with fists. In fact, the zombie robots are threatening the safety and even the lives of the participants. Who does that in our litigious society? Kate’s father turns out to be running the show, and he drugs both Kate and Nate in a thriller type turn of events that is anything but funny. I also couldn’t help thinking how, for this one contest, millions of dollars worth of robots are destroyed.

It is downright creepy how one of Nate's techie friends helps him track down Kate at her work at a theater in NYC after she successfully flees her father. The friend uses face recognition software that he invented.

The book ends with a “happy for now ending” with the romance. They plan to go out on their first real date and are presented as, out of the blue, being madly in love.

After presenting the father as a scary control freak who kept Kate under tight control all through the rest of the book, such that she fled from the house to escape him, the ending turns him into a paper tiger whom Kate is starting to “talk to” and work things out with. That is far, far too simplistic a resolution for how sinister he has been presented throughout the book. And, once again, that’s not funny. It’s irritating.

It is also tied up with a neat little bow about Nate’s father getting fired. He just waltzes into a brand new job just as good as the old one, and life is just fine again. Sheesh.

THE PERFECT ESCAPE made me laugh out loud countless times. Nate and Kate, the lovable protagonists, are each hilarious in their own ways, yet not without depth. The survivalist competition is such a fun and unique arena for the rom and the com as this duo battles zombies and other teams in attempt to win the money that will fund their dreams. Nate and Kate both want to win the money, but up against so many obstacles, will they be able to win each other’s hearts? I found myself tearing through the pages to find out.

SUCH a great read. Fast paced and witty, and I adored both Kate and Nate (bonus points for rhyming names!!) Such a fun story and I can't wait for her next book.

The premise of this book is absolutely amazing and yet there are glaring holes in the execution that ruined the entire book.

Kate's dad is extremely abusive and manipulative. He neglects her unless he's deciding her future and micromanaging her life. He threatens to cut off the internet because she went 14 minutes over on her use. He has decided her entire future, to the point where he buys another company to rig an international contest so she can't escape him. The level of horrible he is matches that cliche idea of a supervillain who wants to take over the world. This is Kate's biggest problem and her whole motivation for entering the contest and yet she forgives him, off-page, and is completely okay with him. He's never held accountable for what he's done nor are any of his actions shown as bad besides Kate or Nate saying they are.

Nate's big problem is that his father has been laid off and he needs money. A "dumb, rich boy" goes as far as to enter the contest to disqualify him so that he'll have to throw his grades to get money from the "dumb, rich boy" and the others at his school can get into better colleges. The boy goes as far as to fire Nate's dad from the company to put him into a situation to need this money. How is this even a real problem? In what world would this actually happen? If the dad was willing to fire the dad, why wouldn't he just approach Nate directly and say do this for my son and your dad will keep his job/get a raise? One of his friends is in on this and the only resolution to this problem is telling the dean on the "dumb, rich boy" and no consequences really happen.

The zombie survival contest itself was a joke. It was a really small part of the book and it didn't make any sense. It didn't seem to be very well thought out. The zombies were hyperrealistic robots and it was all a ruse to sell data to the military. How does that make any sense? What does that do to the narrative at all? How did this company have so much disposable income as to make, test, and perfect these zombies AND give a $50,000 prize? For an extremely hyped-up international contest, they sure signed up no problem at all. The entrance fee was also only $100 for a pair. You spend more to sign up for a tough mudder and there's no huge cash prize payout.

I wanted to love this book so much and yet the plot, problem, and resolution were a joke. The characterization of the two characters and their banter was great but that was it. There wasn't another redeeming quality about this book.

*I received a complimentary copy of this book from Sourcebooks Fire through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.*