Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I get into The Escape Room by Megan Goldin which interestingly takes place largely inside an elevator. With elements of thrill and mystery and plenty of suspicious characters, it’s a read to check out, so let’s get into it!
Main Characters:
- Sarah: After struggling to find a job out of school Sarah constantly stressed and worried until one day meeting Vincent the head of a lucrative investment group looking to take on a new employee, now she can finally pay off her parent’s medical bills and live the life she deserves
- Sylvie: Riddled with a difficult back story and scars to prove it, Sylvie dominates at the investment firm by using her hard attitude but also a willingness to do anything to get the job done to get to where she needs
- Jules: Another investor who finds himself stuck with the rest of the team in an elevator forced to face all he has done to get to where he needs in his job
- Sam: As the rest of the investment is finding himself at the top of his game, he would rather be anywhere else than in an elevator with his team playing a silly game on a Saturday in the city, but like the rest, he has to look at what he has done to get to where he got
- Lucy: Another person on the team who gets close with Sarah when she joins because the two just aren’t as vicious as the rest and don’t fit in as well as the others, despite this is a vital member of the team
- Vincent: He is the head of the team who almost has this dominating fatherly presence over the rest, just as the others someone who doesn’t have the best past
My Review
The Escape Room by Megan Goldin is a shifty thriller that dives into how far people will go to be successful in their career, and how far they will go to hide those secrets. I was a bit skeptical about this book going into it because I was aware that a decent amount of the plot took place inside an elevator and I wasn’t sure how exciting/freaky that would be. I have to say though that this book definitely got my heart racing at parts. I maybe didn’t realize just how much elevators freaked me out. I mean sure it is naturally perhaps a bit of a freaky setting but it still takes a good author to make this setting exciting and interesting and I felt like Megan managed to do that in this one.
I gave The Escape Room a 6.5/10 rating overall. It got a bit of a lower rating from me for a few different reasons but it really is a good read so don’t let the rating deter you too much. It’s a quick read I finished it on a weekend and its interesting plot and suspicious characters make it one that you want to read until the end.
The Escape Room follows the present perspectives of Jules, Sam, Sylvie, and Vincent as they begrudgingly go to the office on a Saturday night to take part in an HR call for a team-building exercise. The four have significantly much more to do this evening but none the less go because their jobs are their lives. In the past, we get perspectives from Sarah and Lucy who aren’t at the office in the present for a particular reason. They are dead, both by apparent suicide. So when I say that this team needs a lot of building, you better believe it. As the four go up to what they think will be an escape room activity they find that the escape room is actually in the elevator. Given different questions and riddles to figure out the four soon realize that this team-building exercise doesn’t have anything to do with work and more to do with the things that all of them did to get to the spots they are in.
Overall the plot of the book is super riveting and pulls you into something that may be a lot of our fears, being stuck in an elevator with a bunch of people you hate. A few of the things I struggled with was I found a few of the mystery elements to be a bit obvious as I got into the book. Even though I guessed what was coming it didn’t stop me from wanting to read it, and if anything I was a bit more curious about how it was all just done because to hack an elevator would be very technical. Now this may seem a bit petty but an element that bothered me throughout the book was how many S names there were in the main characters. I just have a difficult brain and this element made it really hard for me personally to remember different elements about characters throughout or mix things up around different characters. There was this one area that I read that was focusing on Sam and I kept thinking it was Sylvie the whole time and had to keep reminding myself the two were different and Sam was a guy. I’ve always loved reading despite my different divergencies but stuff like this just gets me tripped up in books. I know that this is a very specific issue, but this is my blog, and there could be people out there who have similar struggles that can relate. It also may have just been a factor that there were just too many characters for me to handle. I think if maybe Megan shaved one or two mains off the course it would have been a bit easier, especially because we were learning so much about everyone to find out in what way they sucked or did not.
I really enjoyed the mysteriousness of most of the characters throughout the book. It’s pretty clear early on that Sarah and Lucy were good people, but it’s the rest of them that are little snakes slithering in the grass of their office. I can only describe it as the classic Wall Street blood-hungry team in which they give each other niceties but would also cut each other down with no issue if it meant their own gain. It was good to have Sarah and Lucy as characters though because they often gave us this different perspective about how these people really were. From their own perspectives the four wouldn’t describe themselves in the same way, they knew they weren’t good people but they didn’t exactly own up to how terrible they really are.
If you like books with unique settings that are written really well, with a cast of interesting characters to check out you’ll have to add this one to your list. While some elements are predictable some aren’t and there were aspects that I didn’t see coming just as there were some that I did. Have you read The Escape Room by Megan Goldin before? What did you think?
*** Don’t go any further if you don’t want to read any spoilers ***
An aspect that I guessed early on and that I was correct about is that it was Sarah who was doing it all. I knew it wasn’t Lucy because her death is exposed way earlier on in the book and it was clear she was really dead. I think that Megan should have played more into the fact that Sarah eventually ‘dies’ so that the reader wouldn’t be so clear through the apparent division that was happening at the office and how it was affecting Sarah mentally.
The reason that Sarah eventually plays dead is because she is always suspicious of Lucy’s death. About a year after she died and everyone went on thinking that she killed herself Sarah decided to act on some suspicions she was feeling ever since her passing. Like Lucy’s mother Sarah had a hard time believing she killed herself, but she had no way or reason to prove she didn’t. That was before she went through a box of Lucy’s old things. In it, she found that Lucy was being assaulted by male staff at their office. Worried that she would tell, Sam killed her to make sure she wouldn’t ruin the team. There was also this aspect to it that I was kind of confused about in which they seemed to have this money that the team was stealing or something and Lucy was the money maker for it all and with her dying they stopped making money and they were worried she may expose that too or something. I don’t know it was a bit confusing I got more of the vibe it was out of worry she would expose the assault.
When Sarah finds this out she tries to go to Vincent but everyone plays dumb, he believes them over her and she is eventually let go. She creates this crazy revenge plan but just doesn’t think that the four will rip each other to shreds while in the elevator. While in the elevator it eventually comes out to Vincent what they did and he is appalled by what they did, and how they lied. Sarah weirdly faked her death so they think she is dead and have no clue who tricked them into this elevator. It seems like Vincent may have been the only one to live and it’s kind of just left at Sarah riding off into the sunset with her new identity happy to have gotten the revenge.
Given what they did to Lucy I wasn’t exactly mad at what they all got, it may have been a bit over the top but hey what can I say Sarah was a creative girl who learned code to enact revenge. There were a few loose ends with the ending but at this point, the whole thing was so theatrical that it didn’t really seem to matter.
I hope you enjoyed this review! Feel free to follow my social media @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I release a new review!
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