Title: The Escape Room

Author: Megan Goldin

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

Why I read it: Book club pick for March

I like to think that I am a pretty lenient book reviewer, but my choices lately have really been testing my patience. Advanced warning – this review contains a lot of spoilers, so proceed with caution.

The Escape Room is about a group of four investment bankers who get trapped in an elevator on a supposed “team building exercise” where they must reckon with their past decisions in order to set themselves free. 

I have no clue why I thought it was a good idea to read a book north of 300 pages about four people being stuck in an elevator, but alas, here we are.

At first, I thought this was facing recency bias because the last book was so good. However, even if I hadn’t just read The Frozen River and been blown away, this book still would be a disappointment. I take notes while I read so I remember enough information to do these reviews, and my first note on this book was “It’s giving dumb right off the bat,” so that should tell you all you need to know.

First, I hated all the main characters with a passion, and honestly, most of the side characters. I don’t think there was a single one I liked. OK, maybe Lucy, but she was entirely one-dimensional and I thought the author did her quite a disservice. And I guess I did like her mom and wish she had gotten more time on the page.

Secondly, the writing was sloppy, there were too many S names, and how many times do we need to describe a character’s eyes? It was slow, repetitive, and towards the middle, I thought I could skip several pages and it wouldn’t make an impact. The most interesting part of the book was the end, and it was thrown together! Why not build that more into the story? And why not explore the consequences of the actions? And why keep one of those trapped in the elevator alive, only to never mention him again? Just kill him off with the others if you didn’t want that to be relevant!

Thirdly, I had the “twist” figured out almost immediately. As soon as it was revealed that Sara was “dead” (which happened quickly), it confirmed that she was the one pulling the strings. When authors make the second POV the character that is supposed to be dead, it’s obvious they have a hand in everything going on. Stop doing that!

While I disliked August Snow because it had bad vibes and was misogynistic, this one is bad because the plot was dumb and predictable. A predictable thriller is the bane of my existence. This book reminded me of that movie where they are trapped on the tower, and then it turns out the friend has been dead for a decent portion of the time. I never saw that movie, but I was hoping for some type of twist like that at the end. There was not, and when I got to the end of the book, all I could do was roll my eyes and wonder why I spent so much time on it when I knew the ending from the first few pages.

TL;DR: Would I recommend it to a friend? No. I don’t think I have a single compliment for this book.