Race for the Escape
Christopher Edge
Delacorte Press
Fiction, MG Sci-Fi/Suspense
Themes: Cross-Genre, Diversity, Games, Girl Power, Weirdness
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Description
Ami's been looking forward to visiting The Escape since forever, and can't believe her father finally brought her. It's supposed to be the ultimate "escape room" adventure: along with a group of strangers, she'll have to find clues and solve puzzles to get out of a series of locked rooms. Even getting into the building itself is a puzzle. She can hardly wait to get started! But the host's directions - "find the answer, save the world" - are strangely ambiguous... and the first room nearly incinerates them before she and her four companions, all children about her age, manage to figure it out. Maybe The Escape is something more than just a fun game to solve. Maybe to fail here is to die for real - and possibly doom the world.
Review
Race for the Escape has a fairly straightforward premise - five strange children thrown together in a "game" that turns out to be somewhat more dangerous than advertised, with only their collective wits to get them out alive. It generally delivers on its promise of an action-filled adventure tale, playing out like a real life video game, only without save points or cheat codes or extra lives (as Ami finds out when a fellow companion fails to escape one puzzle room). Themes of extinction and environmental degradation start sneaking in to the puzzles, adding extra layers and urgency to the host's cryptic demand that the kids "find the answer" and "save the world". From the start, there's a surreal edge to things that makes one question just what is real and what is staged, and things get increasingly strange the further Ami ventures (and the more companions fall by the wayside), and making the disbelief harder to suspend. Then it reaches the ending, which I'd guessed before then, but the reveal still felt a bit like a bait-and-switch... and the Answer itself has a logic hole that the target audience might not see, but this obsolete child does. (I can't discuss specifics without spoilers, though I will say it both saddened and irked me.) For what it is, it's not bad, and there are some nicely-done sequences and suspense (when it works), but ultimately I felt let down by the story as a whole.