Roberta R. (Offbeat YA)'s Reviews > The Getaway

Mini blurb: A Black teen and his friends living in a corporate community/utopian enclave surrounded by a crumbling world find themselves and their families to be pawns in a horrible game, and set to uncover the secrets of their alleged paradise and fight its elite, while not even knowing if there's anything left for them outside its walls.

***

Rated 3.5 really.

First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on Edelweiss. Thanks to Scholastic for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

The Getaway is a compulsively readable post-apocalyptic (or better, apocalypse-adjacent) dystopian thriller with a twist...since neither the main characters (and their families and friends), nor the reader, know to what extent the world outside Karloff Country is crumbling - the only thing the residents know is that they're safe inside the enclave, and are supposed to be grateful and to deem themselves lucky for being there. Everyone both lives and works inside KC, including main character Jay and his friends Zeke and Connie (all Black), while Jay's crush Seychelle (mixed race) is the heir of the Karloff empire, if only her white grandfather can stop despising her long enough to actually pass the baton. Things in KC are subtly (or not so subtly) wrong from the start, but everyone takes them in stride (or more like, do their best to), until shit openly hits the fan, and the racism and classism barely contained under the surface burst in the open in horrible, elite-sanctioned ways (think...our world, only worse. Far worse. For now).
The Getaway is a wake-up call of a book with a friendship-and-family core. A cautionary tale with a thriller edge. An adventure at the end of the world (or of the world as we know it?) with a honest and hopeful, if not bow-tied, ending. Even if the real action only occurs in the last chapters and I didn't fall head-over-heels for the characters (I did like them though!), I enjoyed the story and the message, and I'm sure teens will get a kick (and hopefully a call to action) out of it.

Note: definitive review (I don't have enough to say to justify writing a full-length one later).