The Getaway
by Lamar Giles
High School     Scholastic    400 pp.         g
9/22     978-1-338-75201-4     $19.99

Jay has lived for three years in Karloff Country, a Disney World–like resort in Virginia whose guests include the world’s super-wealthy. It’s billed as “The Funnest Place Around,” and it is, since outside the walls in this near-future world the planet is devastated by poverty, hunger, wildfires, droughts, riots, and violence. The narration alternates among Jay and his friends Zeke and Connie, also Black and also Helpers at the amusement park; and Seychelle Karloff, biracial heiress to a multi-billion-dollar fortune. After an apocalyptic series of events, the friends come to realize that Karloff Country has been deliberately positioned as a refuge for the “prophets of finance and politics who saw society’s collapse coming” and a “doomsday prison” for the Helpers, and they put themselves at risk by joining a rebellion. Giles skillfully places the four friends in the midst of a brutal upheaval with strong racial overtones, as Karloff Country, so meticulously perfect at the beginning of the novel, is dismantled and the world inside the walls begins to look like the devastated world outside. With elements of adventure, science fiction, horror, and even a bit of romance in a broken world, Giles keeps readers wondering who can and cannot be trusted throughout this page-turning novel.

From the November/December 2022 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.