Escape Room

Christopher Edge's Escape Room is a twisty, puzzle-packed thriller for 11 year olds about five strangers who are told the whole planet is counting on them.

What happens

Ami is a chess champion who loves puzzles, so a trip to The Escape is the perfect present. It's a gleaming neon building with no obvious front door. Inside she meets the rest of her team.

Adjoa is all smiles and pink sunglasses. Oscar is rude and wants to rush everything. Ibrahim quietly solves a Rubik's cube while he's talking to you. And Min, with her notebook and her badge-covered jacket, seems to have appeared from nowhere.

A man called the Host appears on every wall. "Find the Answer," he tells them. "Save the world." Ami smiles, because that's how these games always start. Then the lights go out and they're locked in.

The first room is a dusty attic full of dead computers and a clockwork man in a turban sitting at a chessboard. Ami knows exactly what to do. She sits down to play. But the automaton seems to be thinking for itself, and the game soon goes wrong in a way nobody expected.

Next comes a library so enormous you can't see the end of the shelves. Everyone's library card sends them off to collect a book. Ami's says she has 129,864,880 books overdue.

That's the feeling of the whole thing. It's fun, and then it's slightly off, and you can't quite put your finger on why. Later rooms include a Mayan tomb and a spaceship on its way to Mars.

It's told in Ami's voice, in the here and now, so you're solving alongside her. The team bickering is very real too. Oscar grabs every clue first and blames Ami when it goes wrong. Isn't that exactly how group projects feel?

If you've got a reader who loves escape rooms, logic puzzles or a story that keeps them guessing, this is a winner. It's tense in places, with a fire and some narrow escapes early on.

What to read next

For another clever girl whose world suddenly stops making sense, try The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day. Maisie wakes up on her tenth birthday to find the house strangely empty, and it only gets stranger from there.