Saturday, September 9, 2023

Review - Hide by Kiersten White

 

 


Title: Hide

Author: Kiersten White

Pages: 240

Publisher: Del Rey

Release Date: 24th May 2022


Blurb from Goodreads:

The challenge: spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don't get caught.

The prize: enough money to change everything.

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. All she has to do is hide, and she's an expert at that.

It's the reason she's alive, and her family isn't.

But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes this competition is more sinister than even she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive.

Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide, but nowhere to run.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

A high-stakes hide-and-seek competition turns deadly in this dark supernatural thriller from New York Times bestselling author Kiersten White.

 
 
 
 




My Review:

*I received an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thanks to Random House UK and NetGalley*




When Mack is offered a place in a competition where fourteen competitors hide in an old amusement park, with a life-changing amount of money as the prize, she says yes.

Everyone is determined to win, but as the days goes on and people begin to go missing, Mack starts to realise that there is a darker side to the competition.

As the only living member of her family, Mack is a survivor, but this might be something not even she can escape.

Can Mack figure out what is really going on at the amusement park before it's too late?


Going into this book, I was intrigued by the thriller/mystery element, and in that aspect I thought it did quite well.

Mack was a likeable and relatable protagonist. She had been through something extremely traumatic that affected her deeply and influenced her interactions with the other competitors.

There were a lot of different points of view in this book, and I felt they switched abruptly at times. I also struggled to differentiate between them at the beginning.

Other than Mack, my favourite characters were Ava, Brandon and Legrand.

I would have liked some of the characters to have been more fleshed out, as there are some that I don't remember anything about and that were very flat and two-dimensional.

The setting of the abandoned amusement park was very secluded and I thought the author did a good job of making a creepy, and at times, chilling atmosphere.

The plot was interesting and held my attention, but the pacing felt off and there were times when the book fell flat for me.


Overall, this was a mixed read.