The Perfect Escape by Suzanne Park (Review)

Title: The Perfect Escape
Author: Suzanne Park
Type: Fiction
Genre: YA, Contemporary, Romance
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Date published: April 7, 2020

A physical copy of this book was kindly provided by Books Forward in exchange for an honest review.

Nate Jae-Woo Kim wants to be rich. When one of his classmates offers Nate a ridiculous amount of money to commit grade fraud, he knows that taking the windfall would help support his prideful Korean family, but is compromising his integrity worth it?

Luck comes in the form of Kate Anderson, Nate’s colleague at the zombie-themed escape room where he works. She approaches Nate with a plan: a local tech company is hosting a weekend-long survivalist competition with a huge cash prize. It could solve all of Nate’s problems, and Kate needs the money too.

If the two of them team up, Nate has a true shot at winning the grand prize. But the real challenge? Making through the weekend with his heart intact…

⤖ My Review ⬻

I haven’t been feeling the YA contemporary genre for some months now, but something about The Perfect Escape really drew me in. I love the way the cover is laid out, love the colours, and most of all I loved the sound of the synopsis! The story sounded like something I hadn’t read before in the YA contemporary genre (which is saying a lot because I normally read a lot of YA contemporary books)!

Now, having read The Perfect Escape, I can say for certain that this book was different for me compared to other YA contemporaries that I’ve read. I became invested in both Nate and Kate’s stories, and I really liked that the plot kept me guessing! Not at any point could I predict what was going to happen, which I think is a unique experience when it comes to contemporary books—at least for me. (I did hope that I would laugh a little more while reading this, but this could also be due to my overall mood because of the current state of the world). All in all, I found this book to be unique in its genre and that I definitely enjoyed the experience of reading it.

⤖ About the Author ⬻

Suzanne Park is a Korean-American writer who was born and raised in Tennessee. In her former life as a stand-up comedian, she was a finalist in the Oxygen Network’s “Girls Behaving Badly” talent search, and appeared on BET’s “Coming to the Stage.” She found this to be the funniest thing in her comedy career because, well, she is not black. Suzanne was also the winner of the Seattle Sierra Mist Comedy Competition, and was a semi-finalist in NBC’s “Stand Up For Diversity” showcase in San Francisco alongside comedians Ali Wong and Nico Santos.