Aaaaaahhhhh! I found this the night before I was meant to go back to work after two weeks off from injury…. First few pages and I'm like "library themed escape room"... F*ck me, who needs sleep! And now it's got neurodiverse people, and gays, and dyslexics… OmfOmg!
So good so far! I don’t want to put this book down, which is nice, as I loved book 1, and book 2 was a little less gripping. The cast is great, I tried to write this plot for NaNo and it was WAY HARD, so I’m all in on this one! I LOVE escape rooms. Okay, so I’ve never done one, but I have written and run three, as well as a murder mystery night. As I said above (which was my literally word vomit as I started reading #noescape at 10pm), I tried to write an escape room/locked room mystery for NaNo in 2020. I think I made it about 30,000 words before I bailed, and honestly, it was HARD! So seeing this title, and having read #murdertrending and loving it, I was excited. And I am so so happy that this book was as good as I hoped. Set in the same world* (maybe?) as #murdertrending and #murderfunding, this book starts with our protagonist completing an “impossible” escape room. We learn pretty swiftly that she is not traditional ‘school smart’ - this is done really well through flashbacks - and that she is there only for the money. After this first (her) escape room, she is invited to join a ‘ultimate escape room’, with a prize of $10mil. Things get really fun after that. I loved the details the author had here; each section was so well thought out. I want to climb inside the authors brain (if you’re reading this, can I? In a totally, not creepy, I just wanna see how you work kind of way… no? oh.) and see what it looks like. Having tried to write my own escape room, I know now that I didn’t go nearly big enough! If you loved the first books, if you loved the movie Death Race, read this. I can’t say any more because spoilers, but it’s so well written. It grabbed me and I didn’t want to put it down (who needs to work?), and I inhaled it. It has been added to the list of Top Books I Read in 2021 - I’m that impressed. Content warnings: gore, language, emotional abuse, toxic family relationships Overall Rating: 5+ stars! *I try not to Goodreads before I write my reviews, but I just jumped on and found out that actually this is set 20 years before #murdertrending and OMG I now have so many more questions and theories and I went back and read #murdertrending and #murderfunding** the SECOND I finished #noescape, and now I’m back to #noescape and I’m just like…. I need to read them again with this new knowledge!!!! **and I was wrong, maybe I never finished it the first time, it was good!
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“I am white, non-binary, queer, and disabled” - Marieke Nijkamp
This is an important statement before I go any further in this review. There is a lot of diversity in this book - out of the five main characters, I think there is only one who doesn’t openly identify with the LBGTQIA+ community, and at least two have significant disabilities (one an invisible illness if I read it right); plus we have an autistic character as well! I will admit, I DID go looking for information on the author, purely because of the amount of representation that we are hit with in the first chapter of this book. Being honest, I was a little wary of just how much there is, as I have had a few experiences recently where it just felt like the author simply wanted to “tick all the boxes” and prove they have diversity. This book however, despite my misgivings at the beginning, made sense and they didn’t feel like lip service. It felt more like when I was in a writing group, and the number of people who were LGBTQIA+, had invisible illnesses, or were on the mental health spectrum felt a lot higher than it did in a group picked from the street at random. And that’s ok. Creative people gravitate together - search disabled cos players for example. The are a lot of them out there, so it didn’t feel off to have that many different people in one place. Ok. So. The beginning. This is my exact notes from 4% of the way into this book: at 4% of the way thru I feel the need to go back and re-read because wait, who TF is Maddy? Is the MC (Finn) trans? they have a binder - injury or chest? have crutches - arth? Is Ever they/them? Word of advice? Stick with it. This book was so good, once I got my head around the craziness that was the first 5-6% where we meet every single character in detail, I didn’t want to put it down. And oh! The TTRPG game NEEDS to be a real game. If the author wanted to make a rule book/playable RPG out of it, I would be all over that. As a D&D nerd, the storytelling by Ever was absolutely beautiful. I would happily read the fantasy series which could use this in-book game as a jumping off point! The teens are on a mountain, venturing into Gonfalon one last time before the end of high school - before they are separated by life moving forwards. Each if the teens is struggling with a secret; with grief; with something they can’ bring themselves to say out loud. Gonfalon and their RPG characters give them a chance to step back from their “real” problems and bond with their friends. Their game is interrupted when the high-tech. modernised “cabin” begins to have electrical problems, and things only go downhill from there, in the classic tradition of Pretty Little Liars, This Lie Will Kill You, There’s Someone Inside Your House, or movies like When A Stranger Calls. The weaving together of the actual flesh and blood humans and their Gonfalon counterparts was perfect. The usage of the game being applied to real life gave the characters something to grasp hold of, to cling to in order to make it through the night. It was a clever parallel with how the group kept the teen together and functioning by creating a family of sorts - people who knew the real you, and didn’t judge. “This world is a messed up and scary place. Life is too short and too hard not to embrace happiness and joy, courage and possibility, and sometimes fear and grief and sorrow too. We have to find our family. We are stronger when we stand against the darkness together, and if our brief moment of happiness is nothing more than a flare, it lights up the path for others." - I think this is my favourite quote, though I highlighted a lot! Content warnings: fantasy, fantasy deaths, death, gore, blood, trans-phobic assault, mental illness, panic attacks, neuro-diversity (accurate thought processes could be triggering), dissociation, drug use. Overall Rating: 4.5 stars - I wanted to give 5 but the beginning was just a little too much knowledge dumpy for me. Will highly recommend however! I received this books as an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Pub Date - 15 Sept 2022 |