Hide by Kiersten White

​It was a simple enough of a premise. Hide. For seven days. If you’re found, you’ll be eliminated. If you’re not, you’ll get 50K. 
    For Mack, haunted well into her 20s by a traumatic childhood event, a homeless and helpless sort of a person who specializes in passing through life invisibly, it was a chance at a fresh start. For others it was some version of the same, be it out of necessity, loneliness or desire for fame and fortune. And thus, fourteen 20something-year-olds were assembled and led into an abandoned amusement park.
    It started off amusingly enough, but soon they came to realize it isn’t all fun and games and this twist on a childhood’s favorite is deadly. Soon, hiding became a matter of survival.
     Alliances will be formed, secrets will be uncovered and blood will be shed.
     Also, social commentary on the obscene socioeconomical (and generational, and racial, and so on) divides in the American society will be made. 
     So yeah, this book has a lot going on. And does it all pretty well too. The author, apparently famous and prolific in YA realms, is making her adult debut with Hide and she doesn’t venture too far from her chosen age group. These characters are all still very young and young acting; it isn’t YA anymore, but it’s comfortably YA-adjacent. Which is to say, it reads pretty young, but not in that adult-intelligence-insulting way that YA does.
     Overall, it’s very dramatic, plenty exciting and really fun. So much so that you tend to forgive the oversimplifications and overexplanations (plot-wise, emotional and ideological) that this book like most young-oriented literature is prone too. Plus the setting is picture perfect and perfectly atmospheric. Amusement parks rank up there with asylums and circuses for genre fiction ideal locations, don't they.
     Reminded me of something like a just out of teen years baby of Fantasticland (Bockoven) and The Last One (Oliva). Which is, I suppose, a compliment, for those two are excellent books. All in all, fun was had. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.