(https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49169365-five-total-strangers)
“As addictive as it is unpredictable,” said Natasha Preston, New York Times bestselling author of The Color on My Secret to Tell about this novel. Really, though, the word “addictive” should have been “strange” and the word “unpredictable” “improbable.” Five Total Strangers was a poor attempt at a genuinely good thriller; what kept me going through the novel was my desire to see what the author’s explanation for all the unexplainable events and plot of the book was. It’s centered around an 18-year-old girl named Mira whose aunt has just recently passed away. At the opening of the book, she’s headed to Pittsburg where her mother, who has been experiencing great grief over the tragedy, lives. After the plane she’s on quickly lands in New York, she’s unable to get on the connecting flight to Pittsburg due to a snowstorm. Desperate to get to her mother, she takes up the offer of a college girl named Harper to carpool with herself and her three college friends in a rented car to Pittsburg. Unbeknownst to most of the passengers in the car, things are about to turn really ugly. From getting into car accidents on the highway to stealing gas from a station (and subsequently being chased by the irate owners) to having personal possessions go missing (almost as if they’re being vaporized into thin air), there’s really just a “series of unfortunate events” that make the book seem like it’s from the I Survived series.
I found many elements of this book that I disliked. Firstly, absolutely everything that can go wrong seems to go wrong in the story, which made it cringey and unbelievable. I believe the author was going for a full heat blast in terms of the plot and plot twists, but it just didn’t work for me –it was cheap and the twists were shabby, as so many are false alarms. The twists I had the most problem with were objects randomly vanishing, particularly Mira’s map. This may be a bit to hard to understand without context, but my point is that the series of plot twists really takes no break. It’s almost like being on a roller coaster ride that only loops and sharply turns all the time with no brief segments of straight track. That wouldn’t make for a very enjoyable experience, would it?
The strangest element of the story was some mysterious man that Mira kept spotting in the various places that she and the college students were stopping at, whether it was the bar, the rest stop, or the gas station. It’s really improbable that the man could have been at all of those places at the exact time Mira was there; it was just a nonsensical element of the story that really didn’t make sense. To the author’s credit, maybe I missed something here. Maybe readers were supposed to suspect him as the culprit behind the mysterious mishaps the main characters were experiencing, such as the missing items? Or perhaps Mira was having hallucinations from the stress of the car ride and journey?
Another aspect of the story that I disliked was the ending. Throughout most of the book, Richards describes Josh as red in the face, in pain, etc. due to a leg he has in a cast. And yet, in the final and biggest plot twist, Josh is revealed to be the one responsible for the incidents in the car and stalking Mira. (Yes, it turns out that one of the passengers in the car is Mira’s long-time stalker.) He pulls off his cast and reveals that his leg is just fine. Richards so deliberately misguides readers that it’s hard to appreciate the twist. Well-executed plot twists should make sense. Josh even kept up the act of his leg being hurt when the fuming gas station owners (see above) caught up with Mira and the college students and were physically attacking, or at least prepared to physically attack them.
Furthermore, I honestly found the main characters to be incredibly whiny and dislikable. Several of them are cantankerous and complain about every little thing. The only one remotely likable was Harper and that’s because she showed kindness to Mira, but it’s incredibly easy for readers to feel and remain disconnected from the central characters.
Next, I didn’t understand why the college students and Mira didn’t continue to seek outside help or seek the authorities when they managed to reach a bar following their encounter with the gas station owners, during which one of the owners was run over by a car. Would people not naturally be distressed in that situation and want to seek outside help? The main characters acted so contrary to the normal human reaction in my opinion. To be fair, they did decide to receive some help from the adults who were at the bar but let them just leave after getting some help in the form of food. Then, after getting out of the bar, the central characters decide to try to drive through deep snow to continue to try reaching Pittsburg. This goes against human instinct. It’s so obvious that this element of the story was purposefully set up by Richards to advance her plot.
In conclusion, I was truly disappointed by Five Total Strangers. I didn’t go in with a lot of expectations, but to sort of sum up my criticisms of the book, the characters felt distant, the plot twists were shabby, and some elements of the story felt inconceivable altogether. Opinions on this book are pretty mixed, I think, so you may end up in fact enjoying this book. No matter what you may feel after reading this book, however, I can guarantee that it is not and will never be a top-class thriller novel. Maybe instead try out Richard’s thriller book Six Months Later, which I found to be an overall more unique and passably enjoyable story. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t enjoy Richard’s style of writing and preferences for writing can certainly vary, so don’t let this discourage you from trying Five Total Strangers out!
Review by ~ Andrew
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