Five Total Strangers
Natalie D. Richards
Sourcebooks Fire
Fiction, YA Thriller
Themes: Country Tales
***+
Description
This Christmas, high school senior Mira just has to get back home to Pennsylvania. Last year, her aunt Phoenix died
of cancer, a devastation that nearly destroyed Mira's mom, Phoenix's twin. She would've been home already, but her
aunt's dying wish had been for Mira to continue pursuing her art education at a private California school, which meant
living with her father on the west coast. But Mira knows her mother is going to need her more than ever this year,
facing her first holiday without Phoenix, so she flies back east - straight into a nightmare.
When a blizzard threatens to strand her at the Newark airport, the girl despairs of getting home in time... until her
seatmate from the flight, chatty college girl Harper, manages to snag one of the last rental SUVs available. Together
with three others, all college students, they set out to try to beat the storm to their respective destinations - but
the biggest danger they face might be something worse than the black ice and whiteout conditions. For all that they
seem friendly, these are all total strangers, and strangers can carry the deadliest of secrets...
Review
This is a fairly simple premise, as many of the most successful thrillers are: five apparent strangers thrown
together and trapped by circumstance, endangered from without and within as they try to survive. Narrator Mira has
been struggling with the death of her beloved aunt, also an artist, but has had to be the strong one to support her
devastated mother. Christmas was always the big family holiday, so it being the anniversary of Phoenix's passing is
sure to drop her mother back into the near-fugue state that she was stuck in a year ago - and it's not doing much
for Mira, either, for all that she hasn't let herself process or feel her own grief fully. So she has plenty of
reason to take a risk and jump in a car with four nice-seeming strangers, braving a major snowstorm to try to reach
her mother. The others in the car each have their own secret motivations for taking such a risk as driving into the
jaws of a major weather event, which come out as the storm worsens and stakes for survival are ratcheted up - and
when strange things start happening, such as personal items going missing. Mira's gut tells her she's in danger,
but from whom? Any of her traveling companions could be trouble, for all that they initially seemed so nice and
stable when she met them at the airport. Occasional chapter intercuts hint at a greater threat to Mira in
particular, that at least one of her carmates has a very personal vendetta, even as actions taken during the
journey lead to other complications that put them all at risk. Between the stress of the blizzard, her inner
turmoil, the skyrocketing risk factors, and increasing suspicions about just what kind of people she's stuck with,
Mira soon realizes she doesn't know whom to trust or to fear anymore, or even if she can trust herself. Yet she
can't just walk away into a blizzard; she's stuck in the car, same as everyone else, as the tension grows and
things take one dire turn after another. As a pure "bad things happen and keep happening until the climax" level,
Five Total Strangers does deliver.
Where it lost ground in the ratings is a little harder to quantify without spoilers, but it has to do with how some of
those on-the-road complications play out, as well as some of the secret revelations. It started getting a bit hard to
suspend disbelief over some of those elements. I'm also not entirely sure the story really needed the stalker angle,
or to make Mira a particular target and in some greater danger. There were a few things that felt a trifle
unsatisfactory at the end, strings that could've used tidying up (or maybe shouldn't have been there to begin with).
While the overall story is indeed decently thrilling, those things bugged me just enough to shave a half-star.