Eight hours. Six friends. Five survive. That’s the tagline for Holly Jackson’s Five Survive, a teen thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat the whole read. What starts off as a road trip from Philadelphia to a warm spring break destination turns into a tense hostage situation, with a sniper keeping six friends hostage. The sniper communicates to the group through a walkie-talkie, with which he tells the teens and young adults in the R.V.: one of the passengers has a secret, if they give that secret over to the sniper- the other five may leave.
Red Kenney, a disaffected but clever seventeen year old, is trapped in the RV with her best friend, the best friend’s older brother, his perfect girlfriend, a Red’s secret crush, and another classmate. And one of them has a secret big enough to be killed over. To make matters even worse, the traumatic situation is triggering Red’s traumatic memories of when her mom was killed while on duty as a Philadelphia police officer, reminding Red of secrets that may or may not be relevant to the sniper, but certainly still affect her.
With interesting characters who had complex background stories and a quick-paced story spanning only one eight hour night, Five Survive kept my attention and kept me interested from beginning to end. There was a lot of action throughout the story, but there was also emotional resonance about trauma and trust and loyalty, just below the surface of the fast-paced thrilling aspects of the story. The plot itself was filled with twists and turns, some more predictable than others, and had enough intrigue to keep me reading until the last page.