I just read another book that centered around a groups of kids dying in an amusement park and it was a big let down.

Hide by Kiersten White | Waterstones

The opening about a family’s drama who lost their five years old daughter at the amusement park in 1974 resulted with park’s closing was also picking your interest from the beginning. Loved the old abandoned park as a setting and the idea behind all that was going on in the park past and present. In doing so, she condemned her sister to death and Mack is deeply traumatised and full of survivor guilt.

The book ends with a nerve-racking scene and you find yourself thinking about what happened next (not to the point of it being a hook for a second book, don't worry). The art was fantastic but the story was so interesting, it held my attention it had my mind full of questions. The ending had me hoping for a little more but was still a satisfactory conclusion to a stellar story. As the competition starts to slowly disappear each day, Mack realizes that this competition isn't what she signed up for—it's much more menacing than she ever expected. Mack has survived more than her fair share of trauma so when the opportunity presents itself she can't help but go for it, the thought of being able to get away and become someone new, it's just too good to pass up, and just like Mack all of our characters have something they're running from or to and that's what makes them perfect "Contestants".

Hide by Kiersten White: 9780593359259 | PenguinRandomHouse

innocent childhood game given a horror movie coating, sinisterizing the phrase "come out, come out, wherever you are. Please look around for information on my books, answers to frequently asked questions, and all the news that’s fit to remember to post about two months after I should have. Haunting, startling, unrelenting, and unexpectedly heartbreaking, Hide draws you inexorably in among the thorns and rust, where the monsters are both intimately familiar and horrifyinglyunfathomable. Taken into a shelter they are given the rules, from dawn until dusk the game is on, hide or be eliminated if found. When I got to the middle of the book, I wished I would have kept a chart from the beginning, but in the end many of the characters were totally throwaway so it didn't really matter.some of the players are modern-world visionaries looking to harness the publicity of the competition to kickstart their brand and some are disadvantaged people who could really use that fifty thou in prize money to, you know, live. don't worry about keeping track of all fourteen characters, because the bodies start dropping so quickly that the first batch of cannon-fodder contestants don't even get fleshed out beyond the broad strokes of their personalities before they're gone. One of my all-time favorite tropes are games, or competitions, so when I heard the synopsis for Kiersten White's Adult Debut, Hide, I instantly added it to my TBR. While many of the characters explored in this book are imperfect, with quite a few being antagonists or even villains, seeing into their minds gave the story a level of emotional depth that I appreciated. It just didn’t make sense to me and abruptly takes you from one POV to another in which you’re left hanging.

Kiersten White Kiersten White

She excels at staying hidden and has been doing so her entire life, since the time the rest of her family were taken from her, and sees no reason why she should fail at doing so now. LeGrand is a young man excommunicated from his isolated, cultish community and desperately worried for his vulnerable sister left behind.There were a few instances where a character came into an item that provided lots of information to them and to the reader, and while it did feel exposition-heavy in those instances, it also felt necessary for either the reader to understand the stakes that the characters didn’t yet realize, or to catch the characters up on what the reader had come to suspect. The art was amazing and really set the eerie tone of the park while still being so vibrant and eye catching. My only concern is there are too many characters and some of them are truly annoying and easy to forget. Also, there was a plot device used to help explain the background of the contest which generally I like, but here, the execution of it, I just felt like it was too convenient.

Hide: The Graphic Novel by Kiersten White | Goodreads

What an exciting and fun opportunity for all the players chosen to participate in this game where several contestants are hoping to jumpstart their social media careers and others just want to win the big money. Mack is skilled at making herself invisible, having survived her father’s massacre of her family by hiding.

The suspenseful plot combines elements of Thomas Tryon’s classic Harvest Home, Netflix’s Squid Game, and the social commentary of Jordan Peele’s film oeuvre and mixes these with a revelatory pacing reminiscent of Spielberg’s Jaws. So not only did the book skip what would have been the best part of the ending, what they kept didn't make a lot of sense.