Book Review #118: Five Survive by Holly Jackson

 

I loved Holly Jackson's 'A Good Girl's Guide to Murder' so much that I've been pre-ordering her books since then. This is the first one that didn't fall within that series, so I was really excited to see how different this story would be, and where it would go.

Six friends are going on a road trip in an RV when they suddenly break down in the middle of nowhere at midnight. But soon they realise that there was nothing sudden about their breakdown - someone is hiding, watching them, waiting for a secret to be revealed. But what is the secret? Whose secret is it? And with 6 hours until daylight, will everyone survive the night?

I loved this book! I won't lie, I really didn't like it at first, but it definitely got a lot better as it went on.

It took me a long time to get into the story. At the beginning, I hated all of the characters (which is really strong but absolutely how I felt). I couldn't connect to them, none of them seemed to have real personalities, and being in the RV with them felt like a chore.

And to be honest, a lot of this didn't change throughout the story, I still feel like some of the characters didn't have personalities, and I never connected to most of them. But what changed was the story itself. As soon as the RV broke down I was sucked in and couldn't stop reading.

I loved that you could really tell how much research the author did. Every possible scenario was thought out, and I feel like the reader almost gained as much random knowledge as the characters did.

Because of the nature of the story, it was good at times to not know much about these characters. While I wish we did get to know them better, it is also good that we are kept at a distance.

One of the big plot points in the story is that a secret needs to be revealed. And as interesting as this was, only a few secrets were revealed, most of which were tame or cliché. It would have been really great to see more exciting secrets get revealed, especially if the secrets actually had an impact on some of the other characters.

But having said that, I really enjoyed the reveal. The reasoning behind it was better than the reveal itself, for me. But it was still a great read and when I finished the book, I definitely felt like the reveal was good enough to sustain the story.

Overall, while I didn't love the characters, I loved the story. And the book gets an extra half-star because I literally could not put it down! 

4/5