When I wasn’t reading Hide, I was thinking about it—it’s one of those rare books that twists itself into your consciousness. The writing alone stands out as capable of carrying the story even if the characters and plot were lacking—which they are most certainly not—due to its sheer power. Like the main character of this story, I've spent a lot of my life attempting to disappear in a crowd. A new month of exciting publishing has arrived, and we like to think of this as a little heat to jumpstart your summer reading.

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 character's pasts are intertwined well into the current story and overall are just above average characters worth reading.White's canny vision of a deadly game that pits millennials against each other and the self-indulgent families that oversee the game's completion has more on its mind than just delivering shiver-inducing horror spectacles (although it does that, too). White already had me with the premise of a high stakes hide and seek game where money is the prize but undisclosed dangers threaten the players. From veterans trying to come to terms with loneliness and PTSD to a self-obsessed Crossfit instructor, a wannabe Instagram model, and the child of a religious cult, these are all wounded and lost souls, each looking for a way to reintroduce meaning and hope to their lives. The paths themselves like a labyrinth that lead to the centre of the park and the monster that awaits.

but I will have to keep your “warnings” in mind once I get to this book, because it would seem that high expectations might work against my enjoyment of the story… Thank you so much for sharing this!That being said, this is a book that takes the author from her usual YA genre into the adult genre and for me this still felt a little on the YA side. One of the migrant workers was arrested for her murder, but the negative publicity left a stain that didn’t wash out. In short: This place is terrifying and would have been equally so without the addition of a slightly demonic supernatural element. Mack is a person who knows all about hiding, in her troubled past she once in a very real game of hide and seek that saw the rest of her family butchered.