It's the opportunity to win $50k that pulled in the 14 contestants in a game of hide and seek in an abandoned amusement park. That's why Mack, who has been living in shelters is there but what about the others? There's a list of rules everyone must abide by (the light in the sky to call them in at the end of the day Is indeed reminiscent of Hunger Games) but, you might guess, not everyone does. This is a short fast paced read where the back stories for most of contestants are little more than sketches (but does that matter?). Things quickly go off the rails and no spoilers from me as to how that happens. Or about how Mack, who has hidden to save her life in the past, copes. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A good one.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley and am voluntarily posting a review. All opinions are my own.
I haven’t read a Kiersten White book in a while, but Hide intrigued me. It’s basically the escape-room trope set in an amusement park. There's a great buildup, with a dark sense of history to the park established in the opening chapter, then built on throughout the book. The tension it builds is fantastic; and while the book is short, it’s just the right length to capture all the thrills and chills, twists and turns, and leave you reasonably satisfied.
My one complaint is that there is a rather large cast of of characters, what with the many participants in the tournament. None are developed enough to be that interesting. However, I suspect this book aims for more of a quick, plot-driven focus, so it’s understandable that the characters exist merely as tools to push that forward. I did appreciate the way the cast as a whole and their circumstances as young people who struggle in terms of employment and finances comments on the issue of the challenges younger generations have making a living today, something White confirms is a theme she thought about in the acknowledgments.
This is an engaging read, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for an immersive, quick thriller/horror read.

I went into this book thinking that it was going to be a hide and seek game in an abandoned amusement park that turns deadly because of a serial killer or something but that is 100% not what it’s about 😂 While part of me wishes that was the plot of the book, the other half really enjoyed the actual plot! I can’t say much without giving spoilers so I’m going to try my best to be vague.
*
I think my main issue with the book was just that there were too many characters and it made the story hard to follow at times and diluted the plot a little bit. I completely understand why it was necessary to show each of the characters at different times so we could actually see what was going on but I just think it was too many overall. My favorite part of the book was the last like 30% because at that point there were only a few left so it made the plot flow better. The only other thing is that I just feel like it ended so abruptly and I really want to know what happened next. 🤷🏻‍♀️
*
I loved the setting and I would love to see more thrillers set in abandoned amusement parks! Also this is a book that I would love to see adapted! I think they would be able to do so much with the setting and the plot and it would just be so awesome to see it all on screen. I also really loved the core group and loved them being a little found family!
*
Overall, this wasn’t my favorite book but I did really enjoy it and hope to see it adapted one day! I would recommend if you like the “deal with the Devil” aspect of Ready or Not, the found family trope, or competition reality shows. - Hide releases on May 24th, I received an arc from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

So grateful to Netgalley for spoiling me rotten with these amazing horror books.

14 contestants, a Hide and Seek game in an abandoned amusement park, winner takes $50,000. Seems straight forward enough until people start missing and only blood and pieces of their clothing remain.

Without giving too much away, I always love a "for the greater good" horror trope. It illustrates so well how monstrous humans are to one another. White does this flawlessly while also creating characters who we love, hate, and miss when they're gone. I felt many times that I was going to be able to guess what was coming next and, to my delight, was wrong every time.

Kiersten White has made a life long fan out of me.

14 competitors. 7 days. A high stakes hide and seek championship game - winner gets $50,000. For each of the contestants, this would be a life changing sum. Staying hidden for a week seems like an easy enough task. But they quickly start to realize things are not exactly as they seem.

This would be a great beach read - fast paced and flew by and I definitely recommend reading in the daylight!

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance reading copy.

I’m a sucker for a storyline where many enter and few will survive 🤣. Seriously, if there is a story where people are forced to fight against each other or against "something" to survive in a “locked-room” environment, I just can’t help but love it!

Which brings me to Hide, a story of 14 contestants entered in a game of Hide and Seek at an abandoned amusement park. The 14 contestants don’t have a ton of details about this new mysterious game, but they know that there’s money for the winner at the end, and for these people, that’s enough. What starts out as a fun game of Hide and Seek soon turns deadly.

I absolutely loved the situation for this one. The contestants don’t realize what they are entering, and so there’s a time frame of unknowingly playing the game before realization dawns for them. There are a lot of mysteries to unravel with this one, and each reveal created more understanding, but also more questions.

The story follows all 14 characters and can be a bit confusing early on. There’s a lot of POVs, and I do wish there had been headers with the character’s name so I knew who we were following. That maybe have been fixed in release copies, but my ARC didn’t have that, and it would have been helpful. Getting past that, the characters do start to die off, so that makes the POVs easier to follow🤣. I liked the POVs because it helped to reveal things throughout the story, but there were a few that didn’t seem necessary.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one, and I would recommend it for readers that enjoy a paranormal horror story.

Blog: Angry Angel Books (angryangelbooks.com)
Posting Date: May 17, 2022
Link: https://angryangelbooks.com/2022/05/17/hide/

***

Source: DRC via NetGalley (Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Del Rey) in exchange for an honest review
Pub. Date: May 24, 2022
Synopsis: Goodreads

Why did I choose to read this book?

Aside from her Camelot books, which I felt were too young for me, I will read anything Kiersten White writes. I was a huge fan of her Conqueror’s Saga trilogy (And I Darken, Now I Rise, Bright We Burn) and her Frankenstein retelling (The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein) so when she announced an adult novel I shrieked with joy and immediately requested an advance copy (when I received the approval for said copy, I shrieked again!). Many excellent YA authors are dipping their toes into the adult market and I am 100% here for that.

What is this book about?

A broken down amusement park is the site of a Hide and Seek tournament. A random assortment of people from all walks of life, all a bit downtrodden, have been invited to compete for a cash prize of $50,000. Slowly the contestants realize that something is very wrong and that the contest isn’t what it seems.

What is notable about the story?

The setting of the overgrown, broken down amusement park was really awesome. It felt like the arenas in the Hunger Games: these people have been chosen to compete but instead of fighting each other, they have to hide from unknown pursuers. Reading about their exploration of the park, strategizing about where to hide, and fantasizing about how the prize money might change their lives was really engrossing. I could see and hear everything – White’s language will envelop you in trees, dirt paths, and years of rust and decay on carousels, ferris wheels, and rollercoaster tracks. The best thing about this book was its setting, and all the other mediocre parts: the characters, the “message,” the twist – were bearable because they were happening in this fucking amazing place. It was inspired, truly.

Was anything not so great?

The hype online made this book sound absolutely terrifying, but it lacked the usual passion and sharpness that other White books have had. It felt like she was shying away from full on adult content, to the point that I would still be okay with shelving this as YA. Everything felt a little too easy, a little too obvious, and the message behind it all just sort of slaps you across the face for the final third of the story like a wet lady’s glove being swatted to demand satisfaction before a duel. The Seeker in the park wasn’t even that scary. An adult novel can be longer, can have more information, can dig deeper and unearth more trauma and emotion and pain. This was a YA novel masquerading as adult, and so the expectations I had for it were not fulfilled. It wasn’t even satisfying as a horror novel.

You know the characters for about 5 minutes before the book ends, so you don’t have a lot of time to come to care for them, which is a bit essential in a story like this. I’m sorry to make the Hunger Games comparison again, but this book felt so much like it. We care about Katniss because we see her life long enough in the beginning of the book to care about what happens to her. There are stakes. In Hide, all the contestants are basically nobodies, no one would even notice if they fell off the face of the earth. Bad things happening to them in this park aren’t suspenseful because “Who cares?” You get pieces of their backstories as flashbacks or shared stories at the base camp, but all of it is so surface level that it’s just not meaningful for investment in what is happening. The only character I cared about a little bit was Brandon and…well…if you read it you’ll see.

The message is that we should care about people we might never meet, that we shouldn’t prosper off the blood of nobodies, off the existence of those at the edges of society, but White’s delivery of this message runs shallow. The act of leeching wealth from the young, from the poor, from the forgotten is so much more sinister than this, and so much more unstoppable, that to throw down a book that can be read in less than 24 hours with an “I’m sorry guys, life sucks amirite?” as a tag dedication at the end felt almost insulting to this late-thirties, drowning in student loan debt, struggling to keep her family’s head out of water enough to breathe reviewer.

If this was what White wanted to say, I know she can do better. There was not enough suffering, not enough vengeance, not enough depth of language and emotion in this particular book to do any kind of justice to the absolute catastrophe that is our current state of affairs. It’s immediately forgettable, I would not want to read this again, and I’ve canceled my preorder because it’s not worth owning.

What’s the verdict?

2 stars on Goodreads, and that’s only because the concept was so cool and the story was good enough to keep me reading until the end, but left me wanting more/disappointed. If you are a Kiersten White fan like I am, you’ll probably want to read it to form your own conclusion, but get it from your library instead of buying it so if you are disappointed like I was, you won’t be out any money.

Sorry guys, this wasn’t the review I wanted to write, but it’s honest and that’s what I promised.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC of this!

I have loved the other books by this author that I’ve read so despite being a giant chicken, I still wanted to read this. This was nice and creepy, but there were just too many characters POVs flipping constantly, that I had some trouble keeping track at the beginning. It did not meander too long, just got right to the action and kept it coming. Overall, I enjoyed reading it, and if you like horror/thrillers in a trapped area, I recommend giving it a try!

I am genuinely not quite sure how I feel about this book? On one hand, it was such a unique spin on social commentary, utterly horrifying and mystical and yet somehow so grounded in reality. People in power and people with privilege have always sacrificed that which they deem to be lesser or unimportant in order to hold onto their position. On the other hand, I feel like you only really got to see this commentary and theme in the last 30-40% of the book. There were hints of it early on for sure, but you only got a true understanding toward the end. I feel like the desperation of each of the characters could have been explored more toward the end of the book even after those characters had left the page. (At the beginning, White wound through glimpses of each of the characters' histories. She revisited their impact at the end of the story, but it could have been expanded upon into a deeper commentary on image and worthiness and social standing.)

I initially wasn't at all sure about the narration style. It was confusing at times at the start. But I really think the writing and narration worked in the book's favor by the end, because the array of perspectives and backstories made the story richer. I would have liked just a bit more from the histories of the main supporting characters though, because there was so much left unsaid.

Overall, I think I liked this book. It was certainly an adventure, regardless. I'm giving this book 4 stars because I think it is much closer to 4 stars than 3 for me, but in my mind it hovers somewhere around a 3.5-3.75.

Spoilers ahead!

Thank you to Del Rey (via NetGalley) for the ARC!

I'm not 100% sure what to say about this book. I've read quite a few horror books, so I thought I knew what to expect going into this, but about 40% through the book it took a turn. And it was a strange one.

I was not at all expecting the supernatural/demon aspect of this book and I'm not quite sure what to make of the beginning of the book considering how the rest of the story goes. I think I get what the author was trying to do, but I feel like there was something missing because it was such a drastic change in tone from the beginning of the book to how it ended. I get that she wanted to leave an aspect of mystery to the story, but I think the first half of the book spent too much time on backstory/POV of characters that died really quickly when I would have preferred more backstory on the Asterion community and information about those families. That part was more interesting to me and I would have liked to know more about that than just the journal entries and the one meeting that Linda had with the members of the families.

I was excited to read a short book because long, overly draggy books are so common now that an adult horror novel under 300 pages was something that immediately caught my eye. And it wasn't bad, but I do feel like there was something missing. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I felt like I read two different books and neither were quite resolved.

The opening prologue is spine-tinglingly creepy and sets up a sinister story to follow. While the large cast of characters might be a bit hard to keep track of to start with, as a reader, you know that bless their hearts, they won't all be around long. I like the different snippets provided of the characters and seeing especially Mack come out of her shell and grow in the story. While the tension builds slowly, once things start picking up the novel moves so quickly and the ending was truly surprising in a good way and not exactly what I was expecting.

I definitely think that my students would love this story because they adore horror and it's one that I think they would enjoy.

I think this is Kiersten White’s wheelhouse. I tried to read a few of her young adult fantasy adjacent books, and while i liked the prose, I wasn’t huge on the genre conventions she used. This is so good though. Wow.

*Spoilers ahead*

Hoo boy! I could barely put this down. The third act did drag a smidge for me, but I like how White pulled everything together. It went in a slightly different direction than I expected, but the themes were laid firmly regardless. And the acknowledgements! I cried!

This will rightly get compared to The Hunger Games, as they are inspired by the same myth. Chunks of the story also directed my mind to 2019's Ready or Not, and 1981's Funhouse. One of my favorite horror settings is also an amusement park or carnival, and I have an art print of Chippewa Lake Park that I couldn't help but sporadically glance to while reading this. There are a lot of great moving parts here!

I'm sure folks will get confused with the many frequent pov changes. I enjoyed time with the different characters, and absolutely adored the core four we spend the most time with. I'm a huge Legrand fan, but there are several great options for "favorite character."

The backstory is slightly murky. Part of me wants more details on the inciting ritual and how they decided to do this in the first place, but the other part of me that grew up going to church wants to keep my mind free of all things demonic. Can you see why I loved Legrand? We stan a king who lives in fear!

Mack's backstory was genuinely terrifying. Between that, the mystery of the little girl, and the contemporary circumstances, I was definitely spooked. I consider this a successful horror novel, and a really good adult debut (with a beautiful cover that I hope will entice many readers to engage!)

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review, I've read and loved many of White's fantasy books, so I was excited to read something by her in a different genre. I, sadly, wasn't a fan of this book. I really liked the first 30%, but after that things got sort of weird and it felt almost like a totally different book. I think there were just too many characters with their own points of view. I think White should have picked a few of the contestants to follow instead of all of them. I really wanted to like this, but too many things fell flat for me.

Great opening chapter, but the rest of the book was terrible. Laughably bad in some parts. Predictable and trite. The ending was like the author just gave up. Unfortunately the whole plot was too obvious after the intro, and the rest was just fluff with lot of unnecessary junk. There were quite a few plot holes as well. It just didn’t work for me.

I’ve read and greatly enjoyed another of Kiersten White’s books and thoroughly enjoyed it. Had suck high hopes for this one but it felt a bit meh. I was expecting a YA story and got it. As a Young Adult book, it was a quick read, you had a brief view of the characters (some many characters) but they had no real depth to them and it was difficult to make a deep connection with any of them. Then I discovered this was meant to be an adult book. That’s when it fell completely flat. Too many questions with no answers and a light quick read. Hoping her next will be more on par.

This book was great. I did have some problems with it but overall really enjoyed my time reading this book. The atmosphere of this book was just so well done and I felt genuinely spooked while reading this book. I also really liked how the lore behind the paranormal aspect was explained. It all felt quite cinematic. I honestly think this would make an amazing horror movie. This also was a pretty quick and entertaining read overall as well. However, like said before I did have some problems with this book. The main one was the characters. They all read very YA and I constantly had to remind myself they were adults and not sixteen year olds. On top of that I also just feel like we got a little bit too many POV's. In the beginning this was quite confusing and towards the end I just feel like it was too much and I would have cared more if it was all focused on just a couple of characters, or even just on one. I also feel like Mack's backstory is made to be such a big deal in the beginning, just to play absolutely no part in the actual plot. That was just a huge dissapointement to me. Anyway, this makes it sound WAY more negative than I felt about it. It's just that I found it hard to explain all the different things I liked about this book, especially without talking spoilers.

This is my 3rd Kirsten White book and it definitely didn’t disappoint. Sadly, I will say this is probably my least favorite that I’ve read by her so far.

Hide is a thrilling and dark story about a hide and seek competition that turns deadly. We follow fourteen people that spend a week in an abandoned amusement park with no cell service, trying to win the cash prize.

The concept of this book is what sold me. 7 days in an abandoned theme park? Sign me up. I got major Hunger Games vibes while reading this book and it gave me major nostalgia. I loved getting to read some of the backstory on a couple of the characters. Childhood trauma plays a big part throughout this story. The only thing I didn’t like was how the POVs kinda merged together. It made it hard to follow along sometimes but other than that, it was a great read.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time reading this one. It’s very fast paced and intriguing. It would be a perfect book to read during the spooky season! Highly recommend for all the horror and thriller lovers out there. Book releases on May 24th.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Del Rey for the e-arc!

A very enjoyable horror book indeed! I could not put this down. Hide very much read like a great horror film from start to finish. I found the characters very likeable and one of my favorite things was the way the author spent a little bit of time with each one of them. Some will complain that wasn't enough for character development but I disagree, I loved it. The mythos of it was also incredible, just very genuinely if horror can be called fun this book is the most fun horror.

The ferris wheel on the cover immediately caught my attention. Then I saw it was written by a YA author I’ve read before, and this was her adult debut. Once I read the description I was sold.

A week in an abandoned amusement park with a tragic history playing a warped game of hide and go seek. If you’re not found, a significant amount of cash is the prize. Mack, who bounces between homeless shelters, has a distinct advantage over the other thirteen contestants – she was the only survivor in her family when her father went on a killing spree and murdered her mother and sister. Mack knew where to hide.

Mack is the main focus of the story, but POV alternates between several characters. They come from all walks of life, but each has a reason for wanting to win the game varying from fame to making friends. After the first couple of days, it becomes clear this isn’t your average reality show. Once you’re found, you’re not just out of the game – you’re dead.

The aging, abandoned rides lend a macabre atmosphere to the story – a haunted house, decrepit roller coaster, and a sinister tunnel of love just to name a few. I actually snickered when one contestant shelved his fear of clowns to hide inside the mouth of one in a bizarre display. I rooted for several characters to make it to the end – some survived, others didn’t. Besides being hunted, the contestants also learned to be wary of each other. Some play dirty.

The description gives no indication of the direction this story takes. It’s unexpected, but I was completely on board with it. There’s a reason these contestants are chosen. I admit the multiple POVs confused me at times. There’s a good bit of head-hopping going on, with multiple changes on the same page sometimes. I had to backtrack more than once to figure it out.

Hide has an imaginative premise that immediately intrigued me and kept me glued to the pages. It isn’t heavy on the horror, so it would also appeal to supernatural thriller fans.

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