Book Review: Five Survive by Holly Jackson

From the author of the multimillion-copy bestselling A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series comes a new blockbuster thriller about a road trip that turns deadly. Read on for Doreen Sheridan's review!

Red Kenny is on her senior year road trip from her home in Philadelphia to the Gulf coast with her best friend, Maddy Lavoy. Simon Yoo, their good friend since middle school, has borrowed an RV from his rich uncle for the drive. Maddy’s 21 year-old brother Oliver is their nominal chaperone, as he and his girlfriend Reyna are the only legal adults present. Rounding out the crew is Simon’s friend Arthur, whom Red secretly has a crush on.

As the friends make their way south, Red finds herself feeling increasingly antsy. She has a hard time concentrating on the road trip games Maddy wants to play, or remembering the questions she herself wants to ask. Granted, concentration has never been her strong suit – at this point, she’s just happy to be graduating high school. As night falls and the friends look for their RV campsite, they find themselves lost in an area with no cell service and, thus, no cellphone GPS.

When the RV’s tire blows, it looks like another unfortunate incident in a string of bad luck. As they work to change the tire, Red realizes she needs to use the bathroom: not a possibility in the RV when it’s jacked up on one side. Maddy isn’t thrilled at the idea of Red going off into the woods to relieve herself:

“You can’t go on your own,” Maddy said, grabbing her arm. “It’s pitch-black.”

 

“I have my phone.”

 

“No, but, I mean it might not be safe.” She breathed out. “What if there’s an axe-murderer or something?”

 

“No axe-murderers in South Carolina,” Simon said. “Only in North Carolina. It’s chainsaws you’ve gotta watch out for. And vampires.”

 

“Chainsaws. Vampires. Got it,” Red said. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”

 

“Vampires love peeling eyes.”

Spirits stay high as the six friends get the RV back in working condition and hit the road again, on their way to an uninhibited time on the beach. But someone out in the dark has other plans for them. Soon enough, the friends are trapped in the RV, with a strange voice in the darkness telling them he’ll let the other five go if one of them gives up the secret he’s looking for.

Oliver quickly takes charge. He’s convinced that their tormentor is targeting either himself or Maddy, as their mother Catherine is a high-profile assistant district attorney. But as the six terrified roadtrippers work to outwit their jailer, they soon discover that little is as it seems. Each of them harbors explosive secrets, and as the long night passes and tempers fray, relationships will be tested, if not outright destroyed. And, as their jailer has promised, not all of them will make it out alive.

This young adult thriller detailing the road trip from hell is tautly woven and highly suspenseful. The first half of the novel brings to mind classics of the genre from the 1980s and 90s, as written by bestselling authors like Richie Tankersley Cusick and R. L. Stine. Our damaged characters long to taste the freedom of adulthood, indulging in banter, romance and perhaps unwise behaviors as they unwittingly barrel from a teenage rite of passage into a living nightmare.

But Holly Jackson goes deeper. Red has untreated PTSD from the death of her mother when she was thirteen, compounded by her father’s subsequent descent into alcoholism. Worse, Red blames herself for what happened. While she can usually float through life without thinking about her mother’s death and her own role in it, the stresses of this road trip bring them all roaring back to the forefront of her brain:

[B]ecause she was crying, cursing her mom for leaving them and letting the world fall apart without her. Cursing herself because, actually, Mom wouldn’t be dead without her. It was Red’s fault. She broke the world, she took her mom out of it, and didn’t know how to put it all back after. What would Mom say to her now? Mom used to fix everything; found Red’s keys when she lost them, pulled those silly faces in the mirror to make her snort on a bad morning. Red could almost hear her voice now, the way she leaned into the word <i>sweetie</i>, warm and bright, but she pushed it away under the static of all those bad memories. Everything came back to Mom somehow, but Red couldn’t drag her into this, she didn’t belong. Mom was dead.

Red’s struggle to find the inner strength to survive the night with her friends, and her assignation of self-blame, stand in stark contrast to Oliver’s self-serving machinations as the night progresses. It’s rare to find such a brutally honest portrayal of a privileged young man whose arrogance and sociopathy are treated, under normal circumstances, as leadership and drive. Will his plans get them all out unharmed as he claims, or are they merely a stopgap while he works to save his own skin?

There were definitely loose ends that I wish had been better addressed in Five Survive, but overall, it was an absorbing, complex novel that hearkens back to the pulpy golden age of the YA thriller while still holding up against its modern adult counterparts.

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