When I was 15, my absolute favorite book series of all time was Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. The first book in the trilogy, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, was (and is) my favorite YA thriller/mystery book ever.
So of course, when I saw that Holly Jackson’s most recent release, a standalone thriller called Five Survive, had won the Goodreads Choice Awards in the “Best Young Adult” category, I decided to pick it up.
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Nowadays, I don’t often read Young Adult fiction, but I was immensely excited to dive into this book for some fun and nostalgia. Five Survive was entertaining and fast-paced, but the plot left much to be desired. Let’s talk about it.
Warning: this review contains spoilers. If you intend to read this book after perusing my review and don’t want spoilers, please click away now!
About the Book
Title: Five Survive
Author: Holly Jackson
Published: 2023
Genre: contemporary, mystery/thriller
Rating: 2/5
Summary (via Goodreads)
Red Kenny is on a road trip for spring break with five friends: Her best friend – the older brother – his perfect girlfriend – a secret crush – a classmate – and a killer.When their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere with no cell service, they soon realize this is no accident. They have been trapped by someone out there in the dark, someone who clearly wants one of them dead.With eight hours until dawn, the six friends must escape, or figure out which of them is the target. But is there a liar among them? Buried secrets will be forced to light and tensions inside the RV will reach deadly levels. Not all of them will survive the night…Eight hours. Six friends. Five survive. A road trip turns deadly in this addictive YA thriller from the bestselling author of the worldwide phenomenon A GOOD GIRL’S GUIDE TO MURDER.
My Thoughts
To start with: I did generally enjoy reading Five Survive. It was entertaining, creepy, and intriguing. Holly Jackson knows how to write a page-turner for sure.
However, my main issues with the book were the flat characters and lack of realism.
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For clarity, I will divide this review into three main sections: Characters, Plot, and Writing.
The Characters
One of the weaker points of Five Survive was that in my opinion, the characters were not as well-developed as those that AGGGTM fans love so much from Jackson’s previous work.
The main character, Redford Kenny (“Red”) was the most developed, though the setup and frequent teasers of her requisite dead parent tragic backstory / oh-so-dark secret got on my nerves. It’s a common trope for main characters to be hiding a “dark past” like this, and the constant references to Red’s secret were a bit much towards the beginning of the story. She was quite likable and sympathetic though: the quintessential selfless and downtrodden main character who is underappreciated and underestimated by those around her.
The other five characters were less 3D, however:
There’s Maddy, who’s Red’s best friend, and… well, that’s about all that I can really think of to describe her. She has a rich family and an annoying older brother, Oliver.
Oliver was clearly intended to be the character you’re supposed to hate: he’s controlling, arrogant, and treats Red terribly. He goes to Dartmouth and has dreams of being an attorney, which he shoves down everyone’s throats constantly. My main issue with his character was that he didn’t really have any redeeming characteristics. He was very one-note, and his traits of being obnoxious and arrogant were constant throughout the story. I had a hard time picturing him as a real person.
Then there’s Oliver’s girlfriend, Reyna, who puts up with his behavior somehow, even though he is constantly verbally abusing her.
Arthur is Red’s primary love interest and is another likable character in the story. He was kind of boring, though, and seemed to be in the story mostly for Red to awkwardly flirt with. That is, until the ending. We’ll get to that…
Simon was my favorite character, and the only one who it seemed slightly difficult to put into a box of “good character” or “bad character.” He spends most of his page time getting drunk and making quips towards the other characters, even when they are in extreme and dangerous situations- which I found slightly unrealistic, but it was forgivable because of how iconic he was.
The Writing
I was not a huge fan of the writing in this book. It’s rather rich for me to criticize someone else’s writing, as I am not a published author, but I was making line edits in my head as I was reading. There were a lot of awkwardly-worded sentences, as well as odd sentence placement and scene transitions. However, sophisticated writing isn’t the point of the thriller genre, and so this is forgivable. Far more important for a book like Five Survive is tension, atmosphere, and an intriguing plot.
The Plot
Unfortunately, the plot of Five Survive did not hold up, especially compared to the standout plotting of the first two books of the AGGGTM series.
I found the premise- a group of high schoolers’ RV breaking down in the middle of nowhere, resulting in them becoming stranded in a place with no cell service, and a random-ass SNIPER in the woods- a bit too hard to believe.
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When they found a walkie-talkie planted and it’s revealed that this mysterious sniper who will shoot anyone who tries to leave the RV, is waiting for one of them to “confess a secret”, it just became that much less believable. The setup was transparently a plot device to raise the tension between the characters as they are each forced to come clean about their secrets.
It turns out, Simon is really the only one here with no secret to hide. All of these people have huge skeletons in their closets.
The first secret to come out is Oliver and Reyna’s: a few months prior, Oliver punched a guy who he thought had been harassing Reyna, and the guy ended up dying. But as it comes out later, it hadn’t been a random stranger but was actually someone Reyna had been cheating on Oliver with. This increased the interpersonal conflict between the characters, but didn’t exactly advance the plot.
Then, the real doozy is revealed: Red’s secret. Earlier in the story, Oliver tells everyone about how his and Maddy’s mother, Catherine LaVoy, is an attorney who is trying to prosecute this Mafia boss, Joseph Gotti, for a murder, and there is one key witness she needs to keep anonymous in order to win the case. Who’s the witness? Oh, of course, it’s Red.
Naturally, they all assume that Red must be the target of this mysterious sniper- though it makes little sense why the frickin Mafia would execute a plan like this one? Shooting out the tires of an RV in the middle of the woods in South Carolina? Why not just… kidnap Red and kill her like that? At this point, I was rather confused.
But then, Jackson throws another twist at us. Red is not actually a witness to the murder because Joseph Gotti didn’t actually kill the victim, and Red was actually paid off by Catherine to lie and pretend she was a witness because the Mafia guy also killed Red’s mother years ago, apparently, so Catherine thought Red would be willing to lie because of that. Which is…. really convoluted.
But THEN, it turns out that the entire time, Arthur was the SON of Joseph Gotti and the sniper was Arthur’s brother, and Arthur made friends with Red to attempt to figure out who put her up to lie about witnessing the murder, and- are you following this?- it turns out that Catherine is also an evil supervillain because she not only tried to con the Mafia but also had been feeding information to them at the same time, because she wanted to frame this other attorney who she was afraid would be elected District Attorney instead of her. AND she also was the real one who killed Red’s mom, which Red figures out because of… the ringtone Catherine used which Red heard on the phone with her mother before she died?
Look, I was confused too when I read this. The book ends with Oliver dying in a confrontation between the sniper, Arthur, Red, and the cops (who finally randomly appear at the end because they finally get service again), and Red gets shot and goes into a coma. It’s all very dramatic.
The last “plot twist” is that Arthur, who managed to get away from the RV when the cops came, killed Catherine LaVoy to get revenge for Red, and then sends her a note telling her to meet up with him, because apparently it’s perfectly reasonable to get with the guy whose dad is a Mafia boss and tried to kill you? I don’t know, fam. I thought this plot was rather out there, personally!
But what can I say? The entertainment factor was there- though there were places it dragged, I did want to keep turning pages, and the reveal about Arthur threw me for a loop. Yes, it was absurd, but it also was completely unexpected and I appreciated how Holly Jackson managed to pull the rug out from under me in the finale of the book.
What did you think of Five Survive by Holly Jackson? Did you think it was better or worse than the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series?
Let me know in the comments!
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