Loved the concept of a completion in an amusement park and the slight supernatural on top! So well done, so suspenseful. Felt like I was in there with them!

"If it's a game, win," Ava says, her voice fierce. "And it it's not, survive."

Come out, come out, whereever you are!

Who doesn't like Hide and Seek? Who hasn't played it? Who will be the winner?

The fourteen contestants all want to win. There is a lot of money on the table, and they all are motivated to play, to win, to change their lives. How hard can it be? Hide during the day and come back to camp at night.

Seven days. That is not a long time. You must be better than the others at hiding and maybe, just maybe, you could be the winner!

This was a fun one for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it. This read like a horror film for me, and parts reminded me Predator (I chuckled when a piece of equipment is called the Predator), The Cabin in the Woods, and dare I say it The Hunger Games,

From the beginning, when Linda made her appearance, I knew things were going to get real. Two contestants would be eliminated each day. Will the odds be in their favor? I think not! Hide has suspense, tension and dread all rolled up in a neat little package. I enjoyed not quite knowing what was going on after their first night. We don't know a lot about the characters, but one is singled out and we know more about her. Slowly we get to learn more about some others which added to the tension and dread in the book.


This one grabbed my attention from the beginning. I was fully invested in knowing what was going on. Readers learn what is happening and yet, it only added to my enjoyment. With the descriptions, I could easily visualize what was happening in the book. I can see this being made into a movie.

I love a good horror book. I love being scared by them. This book has an underlying dread which really helped amp up the anxiety and tension for me.


Who is ready for a game of hide and seek?

#Hide #NetGalley

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Del Rey and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.

Hide by Kiersten White is a social horror novel about a deadly hide and seek competition in an abandoned amusement park. The concept was interesting and I enjoyed the themes of the novel, but the characters felt one-dimensional and flat. Their backstories were not adequately explored, and the writing style did not mesh with me. Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey for the advanced copy.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of Kiersten White’s Hide. All opinions are my own.

The premise of Hide is straightforward. A group of strangers is brought together for a game of sorts. The winner will get a $50,000 prize; they must outlast all others hiding in an abandoned amusement park. Mack, with a mysterious and tragic past, seems like a shoo in. Of course this game is not all that it seems on the surface, as the players, and the reader, soon realize. As the days go by, relationships and bonds are formed which complicate each contestant’s game.

I enjoyed the book, but felt the setting of the abandoned amusement park was not as creepy and atmospheric in the book as it sounded in my head. It could have been cranked up a few notches. There was not a tremendous amount of suspense, because the premise is not unfamiliar and I have read very similar books before. The reveal, as it was, is not really a surprise. I didn’t find much that was original about this book. I’d give it a 3 out of 5.

I was disappointed by this book. There were too many characters, and I was unable to keep them straight. Also, there isn't a lot of suspense or gore on the page for a horror book. Plus, I'm not sure who the intended audience is. The book is too slow for teen readers, and adults are going to want better-developed characters. I'm sure there is a reader for this book, but it is not me.

You know in the '90s when slasher/horror movies are all the rage? This book definitely had all the vibes! 14 strangers in 1 abandoned amusement park and the last man standing would win a cash prize! Enoh cash prize to change someone's life, to be able to have choices to do anything they want. Now this book was a hide or seek show or something far more sinister. We start with Mack as the narrator gives the whole game a push toward the spectacular oddness. Mack has a mysterious backstory that is heart-wrenching from shelters with not a lot to lose! The 14 contestants gather and begin this strange trip with an overly enthusiastic show host in the middle of nowhere.
Now, this amusement park is not what it appears at first glance, it is something far more sinister!
I loved this idea and it was relatively original! So it was a great story and it definitely kept you on your toes. I loved how all the contestants were completely different!
If you love a good horror that is jaw-dropping, heart-stopping, and gruesome at times then this should be your next read! This was a first for me by this author and I am definitely going to check out her other works!
I need to shout out to NetGalley and Del Ray Books for the extraordinary opportunity to read and review this one!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher I was able to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
***
Hide by Kiersten White is a horror thriller that didn’t quite thrill me the way I had hoped it would. Mostly that was my fault, I find horror very hit and miss, mostly miss if I’m honest.
Hide is a high stakes hide and seek game with 14 competitors for a really large prize, but what they don’t realize is that the game hides a sinister agenda.
I think the thing that really got me was I didn’t realize this was a supernatural thriller, hadn’t read the description really so had different expectations for the story. I can’t say I was a big fan of the style the story was written in, breaking the fourth wall to inform you of things that I didn’t find all that important, the characters and how they were identified, a mix of their names and an identifier like intern or friendliest gas attendant, etc. these things didn’t necessarily work for me.
The story itself was meh, but what I really liked was the commentary, what the book was addressing, the scream into the void, the anger and frustration. Those things spoke to me. Overall the book was okay, not necessarily meant for me I think but there are going to be readers who are going to love this.

This book was fantastic! I did not read much about it going in, so I was pleasantly surprised.
Hide is about a group of 14 strangers who must hide in an abandoned amusement park and not get caught for seven days. Mack the main character, has already lived her life's worth a horror, so she has nothing to lose and a prize of $50k if she wins. After a few days, contestants start to notice that those that were found, did not just lose the game.
The book was so well-written! I could not put this down. So excited to read another novel from Ms. White. I do wish there was more of a background on the main characters, but I can see the positive aspects of keeping the focus on the main story. If Ms. White wants to write a story just on Mack, Ava, Brandon, and LeGrand, I am all for it though. I actually did not get confused with the characters, even though there were so many.

This book was a little bit of Hunger Games mixed with the movie Hereditary. Do I think the idea was original? Not really, but it was done so well, that it did not even matter. I think that the concept was neat using an amusement park, and it brought me back to the excitement of being a child reading Goosebumps' One Day at Horrorland.

Unfortunately, Kiersten White’s debut adult novel didn’t work for me. The plot was interesting enough for a chunk of the book that I didn’t dnf, but there are so many issues with the number of characters and lack of horror that I ultimately didn’t like the story. Despite only being around 250 pages, there are 14 characters plus a villain we hop between throughout the story. The constant perspective changes were exhausting - I couldn’t keep anyone straight and we are with the characters for such small amounts of time that I genuinely didn’t care about what happened to them. It’s hard to find something scary or horrific when there are no stakes - and since I didn’t care whether these people lived or died, I didn’t find anything particularly scary as I wasn’t invested in the outcome either way. The lack of on-page horror or death was also a let down - there really wasn’t much horror, dread, or scariness in this book. Hide could have easily been published as a YA title; in fact, the story might have made more sense if the game was populated by younger, teenaged characters. I struggled to believe that adults could continually make such dumb decisions. A ham-fisted, insta-love romance also felt out of place in an adult horror novel. I’m really not sure who the target audience for this book is - adult readers will probably feel it is too young for them, and I can’t see a teen being interested in bopping between so many cardboard-like characters for so little payoff. Overall, this was an idea with potential that was, in the end, a letdown.

Mild spoilers ahead (nothing that the Goodreads blurb doesn't give away).

I went into this book knowing very little about the actual premise, but once I realized what it was about, I was ALL IN. The opening couple of chapters were a phenomenal hook and I found myself finding times to read more, even just a couple pages, here and there.

What started out so fun though quickly became a drag. The pacing in the middle of the book slowed to a crawl, and I quickly became annoyed with how the book was written.

We start out with a historical chapter about this amusement park that serves as the setting of the book, and then jump to present day from the POV of a homeless women who is going to enter a hide and seek competition taking place in that park. This is what hooked me. As we started meeting the other contestants though, we also start jumping between perspectives, and that is when things begin to get annoying. This POV switching was not at all well done.

Instead of having a few paragraphs from the perspective of a single character, we slowly drift into the mind of the others. This head hopping was jarring and very confusing, so that no POV was truly specific to a single character - they were all kind of all the characters, if that makes sense. I often forgot which character's perspective I was supposed to be in. The lack of clear paragraph breaks between these POV switches in my e-book didn't help matters at all.

Putting aside what are some technical complaints, I was still invested enough in the story to finish the book. The author does a good job of keeping the details of what is actually going on from the reader, although all my guesses were pretty damn close to right, so the ending was not a total surprise.

Another major complaint from me was the character development. You'd think with all this POV switching, we'd at least have some fairly deep characters, but unfortunately this was not the case. All but maybe 2-3 of the characters were very flat, characters I was unable to care about. I think deeply developing only a few characters is okay in some cases, but in that case, don't spend so much time in the heads of the others.

The character logic in this was also pretty silly. These hide and seek contestants are all dying, one by one, every day in this park. Even after they start to learn what's going on, the logic among them was silly. One guy, knowing full well what was going on, was mostly concerned if the other still living contestants liked him enough to be his roommates when they escaped. It was little things like this that reminded me that this author is coming from writing YA books.

In the end, I'm happy to have read this one, but overall I was very underwhelmed, especially after a strong hook and opening.

As a lover of abandoned places, the description of Kiersten White's new novel Hide could not have piqued my interest more: A group of strangers travel to an abandoned amusement park for a hide-and-seek competition, only to find themselves in a deadlier game than they ever could have imagined. Yes, please! Unfortunately, Hide mostly failed to live up to my expectations.

The concept of this book is so inventive and exhilarating, from the setting to the characters to the unexpected supernatural element. My issue was with how the book was executed. The cast of characters is way too large for most of them to be given room to breathe in the narrative. White does make an effort at character development, but most of the characters are out of the game too early for readers to have a chance to care about them. The third-person POV switches often, sometimes from one paragraph to the next, which felt disorienting and unnecessary. I'd much rather White have focused on just her few central characters and let them carry the entire narrative, rather than jumping around so much so everyone's perspective was accounted for.

I was impressed with the horror element and the way White drew on mythology to create tension-filled, terrifying scenarios for her characters. But unfortunately, the inclusion of that supernatural element raised more questions than answers. White's attempts to explain its origins felt expository and out of place and slowed down the pace of the story way too much.

You could definitely read this as an exploration of privilege, generational wealth, and the ways the few succeed on the backs of the many, but I didn't find the social commentary to be too blatant -- it's mostly well-integrated into the story. You could also read it simply as an entertaining and terrifying romp through an abandoned amusement park. I read it as a bit of both, I suppose, although ultimately I felt that Hide didn't live up to everything that it could have been.

2.5 stars, rounded up for the gorgeous map.

Yikes….I enjoyed the first 30% of this book and was intrigued to find out where this was going and the other 70% really let me down. So slow and full of so many POVs and their sob story drama that I was left questioning if this was actually a horror book until like the 75% mark. When what was going on was finally revealed the reasoning was sooo ridiculous that I was actually rolling my eyes. Felt like a snooze fest and not a horror to me. Also the type of horror this is- I’m not a fan of but I can’t give away what that is without spoiling it. I never want to sway people to not read a book they want to or might like but I’ll say this: if you like disturbing horror like I do that genuinely makes you scared- this is not for you.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

**Overall**

There is something about the start of summer that makes me want to dip my toes into a horror novel that feels like a movie and Hide by Kiersten white satisfies that itch and then some. Perfect for fans of Stranger Things, Squid Game, and the 2017 adaptation of IT; Hide is equal parts found friendships and high stakes games play with a tense undercurrent that reflects our current social climate all wrapped up in Kiersten White’s stellar prose. I did find few red flags for insta-love ish, a presence that is never fully identified as being demonic or just monstrous but feels more demonic than not, and a couple moments where it felt like the author is trying to make a social commentary without going too deep into it. Overall, I would recommend this book if you’re looking for an easily digestible horror-thriller read to devour by the pool this summer!

**What Worked**

🎠 The atmosphere was super creepy and so tense that you could cut it with a knife from the very beginning and never let up.

🎠 The freaky inner circle of white families making the deal with the monster. It gave me a lot of Ninth House and Get Out vibes and I just really liked it.

🎠 We got just enough about the other characters to get invested in who they were whether we liked them or not

🎠 I didn’t realize it at first but this is inspired by the labyrinth and minotaur stories from Greek mythology!

🎠 Found friendships! It wasn’t quite the level of found family except maybe in Brandon’s head but I loved how they kind of sort of came together in their own ways

🎠 The cover obviously. It captures the story perfectly though I am sad about the lack of a true ferris wheel in the story.

🎠 Kiersten White’s writing style is delectable. She could probably write a legal brief and I would devour it without ceremony.

**What Didn’t**

🎠 The romance between two characters

🎠 The thing that was hunting them is never actually described if it is just a monster or if it is a demonic presence. The description screams minotaur but the way that it is talked about with the summoning makes me think demonic. It just toes too close to that line for comfort

🎠 The ending felt a little too rushed and because of where it ends without a glimpse of what happens to any survivors it left me a little unsatisfied.

🎠 I wanted so much more backstory about the characters. We got glimpses into their stories but really only delved deep into a couple of them and I just wanted like whole chapters from all of their points of view.

Well, I certainly had fun with Hide! It was delightfully messed up, and I enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on and being on the edge of my seat throughout! The characters are a great mix of folks who have been chosen to play a game for the chance to earn some desperately needed money. The last person to be found in this dilapidated amusement park wins, and it sounds simple enough, right?

Oh, my sweet summer children, nothing is simple here! Mack doesn't want any part in camaraderie, or even fun. She's just there to get some money to get out of the shelter she's been staying in, and move on with her life. The other characters range from innocently sweet and delightful, to absolute nightmares, to everything in between. And at first, it all seems easy to understand- two people a day will be found, everyone else will live to play another day. Only... the keyword here is live.

I loved how the author dangled morsels of the story for the reader chapter by chapter. You'd get a clue, then get thrown right back into the lion's den, so to speak. And not only were we getting tidbits about the game, we were also gaining information about the characters themselves, which made me completely invested in the outcome. As I grew more and more sympathetic to Mack and her cohorts, I grew increasingly worried about whether anyone would make it out of this park alive.

The mystery that unfurled was highly satisfying, even if I didn't fully understand a certain aspect of it. I also loved that we got to know the characters so well even during a thriller- that is no easy feat. The atmosphere was incredible, I could really picture this old rickety place, and feel the desperation and isolation our characters felt. As such, I could not stop turning the pages, very eager to figure out all the secrets and mysteries wrapped around the game, the park, and our unwitting "contestants".

Bottom Line: Intense and full of secrets and mysteries, I devoured this one wholly!

When a book comes along that takes a childhood game and turns it into a life-or-death situation, I have to read it. I am so glad I requested this one because holy cow, it delivered.
The death scenes weren’t as detailed as I would have liked (there were a few where it was just alluded to but nothing was described). I know that’s dark of me, but I like some gore (or a lot) in my horror. I also feel it wasn’t as high stakes as it could have been. Regardless, that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the book. The one major issue I had was the abrupt shifts in POV. I wish White would have spaced the POVs apart so we know where one ends and the other begins. However, after a bit, I kind of became accustomed to the format and found it easier to differentiate.

Has Kiersten White been holding out on us? While I have been a longtime fan of her YA books, if this is her writing for adults all I can say: "Yes, please" and "tell me there will be more."
Adult book Kiersten White is everything I have been looking for. Even more so after a long string of disappointments from books promising me thrills and suspense that got nowhere near delivering on those promises.
Hide not only kept me up at night reading but, long after I put it down, wondering what would happen next. And while I won't admit to nightmares; there probably were a few nights when I did wake up worried something was in the room with me.
Unfortunately, while glancing at reviews I did see one that spoiled the big plot point for me, (and I do mean glancing, I wasn't even reading them when I noticed someone literally started their review with "This is what the big plot point is based on") but even with knowing what was coming the story and writing is so great that I was still caught up in it from start to the very finish.

For a change, the readalike blurbs are pretty correct: this <i>is</i> kind of a Hunger Games meets And Then There Were None meets Deadliest Game book, set in a creepy unused Amusement Park. Early on, in the history of the park, there's something that raised a red flag but how and why exactly isn't clear until closer to the end. However, we really didn't need to have all those POVs--it lessened the impact and fear factor of what was going on within the park for the contestants. We get a lot of one backstory, and that could have been halved to give others' stories more space.

eARC provided by publisher via NetGalley.

Hide. Compulsively readable, unputdownable and…deeply, terrifyingly scary.

When Mackenzie Black has a chance to participate in a new reality show with a prize of $50,000, she can’t wait. All she has to do is hide well enough to survive a week and the much needed cash is hers. She’s sure she will win. After all, she’s good at hiding…but that’s another story. Soon she and a group of misfits are at an abandoned amusement park in a small town in the middle of nowhere and the hiding begins. Two participants a day will lose. As the action starts, Mack realizes she hasn’t thought about who is doing the hunting and just what the losers will lose. Important questions, as it turns out.

Hide is a deliciously horrifying, pull the covers over your head read! Kiersten White is a master of slow building suspense. The characters are all too believable, the park is creepy, and the conclusion will take your breath away. 5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine and Kiersten White for this ARC.

A relatively fast-paced horror novel for young adults. At times the pace did slow down, and the swinging between different characters' POVs was a bit disorienting. I though the horror atmosphere was strong enough, and the characters' reactions were believable. The mystery of why everyone was disappearing and why the people in charge were behaving so strangely was good enough, although I think White could've made the story much more terrifying with that information. The ending was abrupt but kind of fitting; I liked that the story ended on Mack's final words on the whole ordeal.

Overall, I thought the story was okay, if forgettable. It was a quick read, but probably better suited to the fall season (October) than the beginning of summer. Still not a bad read, but not especially interesting or exciting.

Hide had so much potential. It came off instead as one of the less successful episodes of Supernatural or XFiles. How can I be bored reading about a deadly game of Hide and Seek in an abandoned amusement park? I think the perfect mix of characters with few redeeming qualities and a fairly predictable series of events bakes into a pretty standard and boring cake. I forced myself to finish it.