In Review: Five Survive
From the author of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series comes her recent standalone thriller Five Survive. Holly Jackson has become an author for me to keep an eye out for since I read AGGGTM. I haven’t finished that series, but I enjoyed the first book so much I’m reading everything she writes. So when I saw her newest book, I didn’t think twice. I wanted to read it. Eight hours. Six friends. One sniper. It was everything I needed to know.
Title: Five Survive Author: Holly Jackson Publication year: 2022 Length: 10 hours 31 minutes Genre: Mystery, Thriller, YA Pace: Fast Story focus: Character & Plot
Red and her friends are taking an RV for a road trip for spring break. Things are going as fine as they can be with six people cramped in a small space until they take a wrong turn in an isolated area and flat a tier. Suddenly, what was an inconvenience turns into a real threat. Someone out there in the woods is shooting their tiers. And they are willing to shoot more than that. There’s a sniper in the woods, and no one can leave until they reveal the secret he’s after. They have eight hours until sunrise to reveal the secret, or they die.
A small group of people trapped and only the secret of one of them can set them free isn’t a new concept. It’s always a fun story for the drama and the usual fast pace. It’s a type of story that will keep you on the edge of your seat. And Five Survive was no different. Although of all the stories I’ve seen with this plot, this one is my least favourite.
When a story falls heavily under a common plot, I go in already with some expectations of what will happen. One of which is all the characters having secrets. This is usually a given. With high stakes, there are equally dark secrets. Although not every character had them. At least on the way I was expecting. In these types of stories, there’s a time for every character to reveal their secret and become the suspect. And the revelations tend to progressively be worse, more shocking, or even not be the whole truth. Although that didn’t happen. In the end, they all had some sort of secret, except ones were insignificant compared to others. This also meant the characters didn’t equally share the suspects’ pool, which defies one of the core purposes of the mystery.
The story was incredibly fast-paced, and it kept me invested all the way to the end. Having a snipper hidden in the shadows tends to do just that. However, I quickly realised the danger wasn’t outside the RV. When there’s a group confined to a small space and with a gun pointed at their heads, it creates a lot of tension. Who knew? And so people start to see their friends as their enemies. One of them has the power to set them all free. They only have to talk. And so there’s a lot of pressure and many personalities clashing together. When it comes to character building, for me, Holly Jackson did a great job. Because it’s those personalities that cause all the problems in the plot.
Red is a hard character to like. We know she’s hiding something from the beginning. And so, that secrecy only allows her personality to show little by little. But also, the way she thinks can be offputting. I was expecting an explanation as to why she fixated on small details when there was literally a gunman outside to kill them. She even notices that her mind keeps trailing off, which has been a problem for years. That gave me the feeling she has some sort of neurodivergence. But that was never specified or talked about. She’s also a downer, so her thoughts usually are negative and self-hating. Her life hasn’t been the best either, so I understand where it comes from. However, that made me not connect with her as much as I would like. For sure, she’s no Pip.
There wasn’t enough pressure from the sniper to justify this type of plot. At some point, he was just a condition. A reason they couldn’t leave the RV. They had a time frame since the beginning, but as time passed by, instead of seeing an increase in pressure from the gunman, we saw less. At that point, the sniper wasn’t the enemy anymore. And while that was caused by great character progression, it started to break the essence of the plot. Don’t get me wrong, because I loved that change. But I also wanted the sniper to keep pushing the characters instead of them forcing themselves.
This is one of those cases where the journey is better than the ending. Even when I saw not every character could be the one with THE secret, I was still hooked. I wanted to know where the story was going. I wanted to see how they were getting out of the pickle. See their interactions and how they deal with each other. But the ending… It wasn’t satisfying. There’s a lot of injustice behind the secret the sniper is after, and while it’s resolved, it’s not resolved satisfyingly. I felt there was so much wrongness that wasn’t righted. And so I much prefer the journey even if it wasn’t perfect.
Being familiar with these types of stories, Five Survive is a disappointment. Although it also did great things. Holly Jackson grabbed my attention throughout the whole book. I was hooked. And I can’t be mad about that. It was a great journey, even if, in the end, it left something to be desired.
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