REVIEW: Five Total Strangers (book) by Natalie D. Richards

Five Total Strangers is a YA thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Mira is heading to her mother's for Christmas. She knows her mom will need her support - it's the anniversary of Aunt Phoebe's (her mother's twin) death.

Except that there's a blizzard on the way and her connecting flight, as well as all other flights, has been cancelled. Rather than wait it out, Mira accepts an offer of a ride from Harper, the glamorous and unflappable college student she met on the plane. Harper is accompanied by several others Mira initially assumes are her friends: Kayla, a young woman who looks sick and sleeps most of the time; Josh, who's using crutches due to a torn ACL; and Brecken, a handsome pre-med student who rubs Mira the wrong way.

In reality, all of these people are actually strangers Harper just befriended at the airport. Or are they? Something weird is going on. Harper and Brecken seem surprisingly close for people who supposedly just met in a rental car line. Random things keep going missing, and everyone in the car seems to have secrets. As the drive becomes more treacherous and the situation goes from bad to worse, Mira wonders who she can trust.

A big part of what made this such an intense read was the claustrophobic and tense real-life situation the characters were in. Would I have gotten into a car with a bunch of strangers, knowing that a blizzard was coming? Hopefully not, but I could imagine it happening, and I could believe in Mira's reasons for wanting to rush home. This book reminded me, viscerally, why I hate snow. I could practically feel myself in the car with them, holding my breath as visibility dropped and the tires slid. The bridge scene, in particular, was terrifying.

Things get even more intense after a nasty confrontation with a gas station attendant, and Mira notices that a man in a yellow hat keeps showing up pretty much every place they stop. Also, interspersed throughout the book are letters that indicate that Mira has a stalker she doesn't know about, someone who's been keeping track of her since her aunt died in the hospital a year ago.

I pretty much gobbled this up. There were a few things that were a little hard to believe, but overall I really enjoyed this.