It took me too long to see the minotaur. [Hide by Kiersten White]

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 a dream future or escape a haunting past—Mack is sure 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 that this competition is even more sinister than 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.

Wow, has it been some time since I last finished a book. And that's not even talking e-galleys! But I did it. I finished Kiersten White's Hide. It took me forever to see the obvious parallels to the story of the Minotaur. Once I did though, I must admit, something was lost. 

As I read through the tale of 14 people going missing in a labyrinthine old amusement park, initially I was trying to guess at what or who the culprit was, their motivations. Once I figured the story was some version of that old bovine horror tale, modus operandi realized, the motivations remained. And that's where the weakest point of the story was for me. Okay, some old White families did some occulty thing because they were afraid of change and risk and life. 100 years later their descendants have continued on with human sacrifices to keep the dark ritual part alive and well, cycling in (or out) distant unwanted relations. Sure, okay. But all that contextualized, the ending of the book fell flat. 

No grand gesture to end the killings forever and always, just unknown future. At the end of the book and in her author's note, White references not burdening the youth, the future generations. I suppose the unknown ending is to reference the unknown future, but I like my stories to be a great deal less ambivalent. The pacing was solid and the shifting of perspectives very fluid, but there were some loose ends. Atreus, one of the key plot movers barely had any dialogue, barely any character development. And yet his actions were so crucial to everything. The same might be said for Ian. All those negative points, I still enjoyed the read overall. And so I must give it at 4 stars at the very least.

Hide (ISBN: 9780593359235) was published May 2022.