This is a nice, sweet story with a fun premise and ah....some definite surprises.
Nate is an entrepreneurial lad from a family that's not doing too well financially, looking to make some big bucks. He works at an escape room, where he meets Kate and they hit it off in a friendly way pretty quickly. Both of them are into escape rooms and zombies and could use some cash, so they team up to enter a weekend survivalist competition together.
Nate's family situation is fairly normal--dad just lost his job, he has a little sister who keeps being a 5-year-old, he's got a pointless crush on a female friend that obviously I'm not really concerned about given that Kate exists. There's a wee bit of mystery regarding not knowing too much about his family members when anyone's assigned to do a family tree in school, but that's eventually explained.
However, Kate's in a bad way. Her mom died and her father's a big time tech entrepreneur who, after her mother's death, is basically tech-stalking, drone-stalking, helicopter parenting her to the point where it sure does seem like she's in jail. I note that she has recently turned 18 but still in school, but her dad sure acts like she has no choice in doing what he says. The amount of nitpicking and stalking he does... He nitpicks every penny she spends (72 cents over budget!), every phone call she makes or gets, going over allotted Internet usage by 14 minutes, there's a house robot to take her vital signs... It's incredibly creepy. Nate actually admires her dad, not having any idea that it's her dad. He's got a cardboard popup of the guy, and imagine poor Kate's reaction upon seeing that! (I note that Kate's last name is a generic one, so it's not totally obvious that they might be related.)
I do seriously wonder if this book is a bit ahead of us in time/in the future from the technology used in it? It feels about fifteen minutes into the future, for various reasons.
Overall, at least until we get to the point of the competition, it's a sweet friends-to-something-more relationship between Nate and Kate, who are nice people. They have awkward moments ("I left my wig in his car!" "I feel forced to eat a burger I don't want to eat!") but get over it. There's a bit brought up about how Nate's a scholarship student at a snooty school and someone's trying to get him to commit grade fraud, but it doesn't get as much play as you might think.
And then comes the competition... This goes into straight up spoiler territory so I'll have to address it in detail in the spoiler cut below. What I will say above the cut is that I was suddenly very surprised and things go from fairly normal world (other than Daddy Techstalker) to HOO BOY I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS territory. I felt like I was suddenly reading a Jennifer Lynn Barnes book, THAT kind of levels of twists. It didn't match the previous tone of the book, so it was a huge surprise. Like "conspiracy theories are real!" level of it. I'm not saying that makes it bad, but I definitely didn't expect the book to hit that level of craycray. Like Kate's life, I can see some level of craziness happening given what her dad is like, but to have it end up all over Nate? Dang.
Overall, it's a very good book, but it definitely takes A Jump and escalates in ways I was not expecting. I also kind of wonder how things resolve with Kate's dad, but again, that's spoiler cut territory. I'm giving it three and a half stars. If you want to know why, check the spoiler cut.
Spoiler space
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IT'S ALL A BIG CONSPIRACY is where that goes.
Nate hasn't paid that much attention to his jerk classmate Pete asking him to commit grade fraud, but imagine his shock when he finds out that the girl he has a crush on has been recruited by Pete to force him to give into the grade fraud thing. Pete's dad used to employ Nate's dad--you think it's a coincidence your dad lost his job? Wondering why Annie seems to like you now and suddenly showed up in this competition? She's involved in the scheme! And then Kate's dad basically kidnaps Nate and is all "btw, my company's merging with the company putting this on tomorrow, so Kate's not eligible to win, so you need to split up so YOU can win and don't tell Kate about any of this, you signed an NDR" and I was all, whaaaaaaaaaaat?
So that really threw me. It was just a giant jump in worldbuilding and tone.
I do wonder how well Kate was able to finally flee her dad, though, given the tech stalking. I'm pretty sure that fucker could have found her immediately with his advantages, even if she changed her name/got a burner phone/whatever and was 18. At the end we're told oh, btw, they're working on their relationship and I'm like, I'd love to have heard what went down THERE. It was a little skipped.
And finally, I want to end on the best quote in the book: "This is Nate. He's my older brother. He beat up a lot of dead people this weekend to win money."
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