I reallly enjoyed this book so much, I devoured this in two nights, I couldn't stop reading and I just had to to what happened in the end!!

good book and really enjoyed the characters and their journey. I liked the romance.. I enjoyed how the characters grew in the book and what happened.

I was so excited for this one, considering how much that I loved the GGGTM series. Unfortunately, it wasn't the banger I was looking for. While I did like Five Survive it wasn't the jaw dropper that the GGGTM, series was for me. I did enjoy that it was face paced and a super easy read. Holly Jackson, is definitely one to look out for in the YA thriller world.

This was a fast paced thriller that had me on the edge of my seat. 6 friends on a road trip in an RV when they take a wrong turn & someone out there wants them dead. The characters were all likable and I could not guess what was happening next. A must read for all fans of thrillers!

This fast paced thriller was hard to put down. I was at the edge of my seat the whole time. I’m recommending it for our state book award. It definitely has teen appeal.

When I say I wanted to love this book, I truly mean it. I ADORED GGGTM and the entire series - including the contested third book. But now that I’ve finished this book, I think I know why it sat so poorly with me.

First - it would be easy enough to forget that the author is not American, save for the very few times she says someone is “called” xyz name (instead of “named” xyz name). Why is this important? The plot of this story entirely centers around gun violence and gun trauma. Is it rampant in America? YES. Do we all have to live with that trauma and fear daily? YES. As far as I know, Holly Jackson hasn’t moved to the US - and thus, it feels like someone outside of the states capitalizing on this - not exclusively/uniquely American, but certainly significantly American trauma, and to put it lightly, that does not sit well with me.

As an offshoot of the above, the rest of the book felt like trauma porn. Gratuitous murder and rehashing of experienced trauma, violence abounds. Maybe I should’ve known better going into a book like this, but as I found Jackson’s previous books incredibly well done, I didn’t expect to find this one so unpalatable and disturbing to read.

I finished it quickly - there’s no doubt that she’s a strong writer - but truly felt unsettled and kind of violated throughout the whole thing. I know I’ll be the outlier and will certainly give this previously-beloved author another chance with whatever she releases next, but readers should know thyselves before getting into this one.

I saw some super mixed reviews on this book, and Holly Jackson is a super popular author of the bestselling series A Good Girl’s Guide to murder. I was immediately sucked into this book, I do think YA books are easier to reach but I was devouring it so fast.

However, even though I devoured this book there were so many things wrong with this one, it just made absolutely no sense that a bunch of teenagers was tangled up in Mafia messes. The characters were absolutely horrible and I did not love any of them - maybe that was the author's goal ??

I ended up giving this a 3.25 because I definitely wanted to finish and it was a quick read but the plot just made no sense to me and the characters absolutely sucked - which kind of seemed on brand with my review of her first book too but I know everyone loved those a lot more.

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 pee: 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:

QUOTE
“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 <i>love</i> peeling eyes.”
END QUOTE

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:

QUOTE
[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.
END QUOTE

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.

This locked room young adult thriller was another interesting concept from Holly Jackson. It was fairly dark for being a young adult novel. I enjoyed the short chapters that moved the story along. It did feel that the book was a bit too long, at times feeling a bit long-winded and repetitive. The overall twist was interesting. Although I didn't enjoy this novel as much as Jackson's A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series, I still plan to read future books from this author.

I loved chatting about this one, and ended up rating it 3.5- I strongly prefer stories with unreliable narrators to be told in first person, so that impacted my experience of it somewhat. I also felt like the plot got a bit muddy at points, BUT if you enjoy YA thrillers I would totally recommend giving this a go.

Thank you so much @netgalley & @prhaudio & @delacortepress !

I really liked this one. There were a lot of layers to the story and I figured a few things out but I was surprised by many things. I wavered back and forth about how much I liked Red. Actually all of the cast, but I did want to know what the secret is, so I kept reading. The reader is in Red’s head through the book and she is slightly off and I was wondering if she was reliable. This was pretty well done because I had a hard time figuring out if I was just reading too much into it or if she was unreliable.

It is fast paced and there was a cat and mouse aspect that I appreciated because you weren’t sure who the second player was. That was a new twist to me. We were never really exposed to the other party until the end. What kept me from giving it five stars is the mixed message. It reads very much YA but these 18 year olds have access to a quite nice RV and are driving from PA to the gulf coast.

One last thing I liked was at the end, instead of having a character narrate what happened to fill in some plot holes, the author choose to have a police transcript, news story and letter. That end of thriller narration is a trope I never like, but this softened it.

I was able to flip back and forth from the ebook and the audiobook and loved Emma Galvin’s narration. She brought the story to life and I was slightly more interested in listening than reading.

Holly Jackson is the best in the genre in my opinion. I tore through Five Survive just like I did all of her other books. The premise is fantastic and the execution is just as good. A rarity in this genre. If you like cat and mouse type stories, run don't walk.

In this book, we follow six high schoolers as they attempt to take an RV to Florida to get to Spring Break. One wrong turn and four flat tires later, they realize they have been steered here by a Sniper who is watching them from afar and wants a secret from one of them. All six of these characters are dying to survive this night.

As with many others, I was an enormous fan of the first two books in the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series. I didn’t like the third book because it felt completely different, and for lack of a better term, felt like it jumped the shark. The events felt unbelievable and the characters just weren’t as likable.

Unfortunately, I felt the same about this novel. The characters were overall flat or unlikeable, some of the choices made no sense, and Red’s character growth, in the end, does little to make up for her lack of it throughout the rest of the novel. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but I didn’t feel like the events of the title were believable enough to make the suspenseful aspects as terrifying. . Even the twist fell flat for me, as while I didn’t guess it, it also wasn’t really surprising. And a tiny pet peeve- there is so much repetition within the novel that it becomes tedious. While Red appears to be suffering from PTSD, and perhaps repeating things is her coping mechanism to stop thoughts she can’t handle, it went past serving the purpose to add empathy for her character or furthering the plot. Instead, it distracted from the plot and did not create an understanding of Red's mental state. And finally, the ending really didn't work for me.

If you really liked the third book in Jackson’s previous series, I think this book would really appeal, for me, this just missed the mark.

This book really just took me for a ride. I loved the build up, the character development, and the writing. I would definitely read more from this author!

This was one of my anticipated reads for 2022, especially after reading A Good Girls Guide to Murder at the beginning of the year. Then I was so excited to have recieved an Arc from Netgalley. I however was very disappointed in Five Survive. The characters were not relatable at all, the plot was just so out there that I couldn't even get into this book. The "twists " were so predictable that it took all I had to not DFN the book after a couple of chapters. I pushed through though, just hoping it would pick up. Sadly it did not, at least for me. I really did want to enjoy this one more but I just didn't. I'm giving it 3 stars for two reasons, the writing was done well and you may enjoy this one more. I leave that up to you.

“And it felt stupid to admit it to herself, but the sight of that little check mark did change something in her. Small, minuscule, a tiny firework bursting in her head, but it felt good. It always felt good, checking off those boxes.”

⭐ 💫

Thank you to Delacorte Press and Netgalley for a copy of this book for review purposes. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

content warnings: grief, death (multiple family members), blood/violence, murder, kidnapping/hostage situation, gun violence/shooting, alcoholism, gaslighting/emotional manipulation, one brief mention of terminal illness

Holly Jackson has been one of my favorite authors since I first listened to A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder a few years ago, and an auto-buy author since I read the sequel, Good Girl Bad Blood. Still having As Good As Dead left, I paused that amazing series when I noticed she had a standalone coming out on NetGalley! The synopsis was a little dark for me, but I made it through AGGGTM alright, so I powered on, sure I would adore it anyway. Unfortunately, I was very wrong.

In Five Survive, we follow Red, on her way to spring break with her friends in an RV. After losing cell service and getting lost in the middle of nowhere after dark, their tires and shot out by a sniper. Will they be able to figure out what the shooter wants or to escape before time runs out?

I loved Pippa from AGGGTM because she felt relatable in her unwavering missions for truth and justice, but I also loved the whole cast, including the love interest and side/minor characters. In Five Survive, I found the main character Red to be jarring and difficult to follow. There are many high stakes conversations happening around her, and this plot had the potential to be really interesting. Instead, Red’s narration mostly provides us with inner monologue with how she is poor and useless compared to everyone else, how her parents don’t love her, how she’s the odd one out on the trip, etc. After each monologue, she has a repetitive flashback and then is distracted by the pattern of curtains, and never seems involved in anything happening. I think we are supposed to sympathize with her sad past, but it felt very “woe is me”, and for 80-85% of the book, Red does absolutely nothing except listen to conversations she doesn’t participate in and have things happen *to* her. At multiple points, we are even told that Red doesn’t understand someone’s facial expression, but makes the same face back, and yet we have no idea *what* said facial expression is. This was one of the worst cases of show vs. tell I’ve seen this year.

Some of the plot twists at the end were actually interesting and a little unexpected, but my intrigue and enjoyment were so low by the end that all I could manage was a shrug. I had mild interest at best in three of the characters, but by the end, really only was interested in Arthur.

I will still finish Jackson’s first trilogy, and am willing to try something else of hers, but I don’t think I would recommend this book to anyone unless you have a specific craving for a gory, slow-paced YA thriller in a confined setting with an unreliable narrator.

I received an advanced reader copy of this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Let me preface this by the fact that I do not usually read a lot of thriller/suspense, but I have read all of Holly Jackson's Good Girl's Guide to Murder trilogy and enjoyed those. I also enjoyed this quite a bit. Holly Jackson does a really good job of making you think you figure out the twist at about 30% into her books, and then the last 20% of the book hits you with an additional 5 other twists that take you for a fun ride.

The premise of this book is that 6 young adults are going on a road trip from PA to Gulf Shores for Spring Break. They borrow an RV to get there, and then they have a harrowing night when somehow they become the target of an active shooter in the deep woods of SC. This is a story of survival and wits, as well as trying to figure out why the heck this is happening to them.

We hear the whole story through our somewhat unreliable narrator Red (short for Redford). Red is joined by her best friend, Maddy, Maddy's older brother Oliver and his girlfriend Reyna, Simon, the aspiring thespian and friend to Maddy and Red, and Arthur, a boy on Simon's basketball team and sort of crush of Red. Red is unreliable because it seems like she has memory problems maybe some ADHD or autistic tendencies, and she keeps telling us she is lying. But she is observant and smart, or as she keeps reminding us "has potential". Red also has a traumatic past, and the word "mom" is taboo around her.

I did see one of the "twists" at 25% through, but the rest of them...whoa. Jackson's writing style should be effortless and straightforward, but for some reason I end up reading her books at a slower than average pace for me. But I think this is her best executed novel yet. Good Girls Guide was fun and quirky and by the end of it, I was ready to be done with those characters. But Five Survive has a fresh cast, a story contained mostly to one night's events (besides flashbacks in Red's mind), and I like how she closes the novel with a bit of her "mixed media" that only appears at the end.

This is somewhere between a 3.5 and 4 star for me, and I think if you like thrillers/survival stories, this is one to check out!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 4 stars
Five Survive is a brand-new mystery book by Holly Jackson, where six friends are stranded in the middle of nowhere in a RV with a killer out there.

“Everybody had secrets, though, didn’t they?”

I immensely enjoyed reading the A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series and had thought this book would have the same feeling as those books, especially the first two, had. I have to say that this book has a very different feel.

The writing is very fast paced, seeing as the whole story essentially takes place in about 8 hours total. A lot keeps happening and because it is fast-paced, it sometimes seems a bit rushed. I had also expected there to be more humor or sarcasm present, as that was one of the parts I loved so much about AGGGTM, aside from the writing format. I have to be honest, there was little humor to the whole story, which made it feel a little static due to that. It was high intensity, fast-paced, constant high tension, fear, etc. It felt a little too much of everything sometimes.

The characters were a bit difficult to like for me. Red seemed very detached to me and a bit two-dimensional. I had a hard time connecting to her and I didn’t really feel much for her. Olivier was just very annoying overall and I didn’t like his personality, but it fitted the story perfectly. Maddy was kind off not present most of the time. I often kept forgetting she was there if Red hadn’t mentioned her for a while. I only like Arthur to be honest, as he came across as a very sweet boy.

The whole feel of the book seemed to lean more towards horror that mystery thriller for me, maybe due to a bit of humor missing and the overall feeling the book gave. It is a young adult book, but I feel like a bit more balance in the high intensity would’ve fitted the story better.

Despite all this, it is a very easy and enjoyable read. While a bit predictable and not as mind blowing as AGGGTM, I still enjoyed seeing all play out during the time it takes place. The ending, while not entirely satisfying in my opinion, was a fitting one for the story.

Overall, it is a good mystery book with an enjoyable plot. While I don’t believe it is as good as AGGGTM, it is a good book.

A fast-paced mystery thriller where six teenagers trapped inside a RV in the middle of nowhere with secrets that's worth killing for…

⚠️ 𝐓𝐖: guns, death threats, mob violence, death, injury

The plot is interesting, it keeps me interested to see how they try survive and as they grew desperate to escape as secrets starts being revealed..

I found the characters are somewhat relatable when a person is in this kind of circumstances, the ugly parts of a person started to show. To be honest, it took me a while to connect with the character and being inside Red’s mind - reading about what she thinks can be confusing sometimes.

I have to admit the twist and turns in the last few chapters are unexpected, some might felt a bit far-fetched but still manage to surprise me.
The epilogue makes the story has an open-ending type which always drives me crazy not knowing the real end!

Overall, this is a pretty good mystery thriller – It’s enjoyable and able to give the “keep you on the edge of your seat” feeling throughout the story.
I’m looking forward to read future books from this author!

<b>Actual rating: 3.5⭐</b>

<i> I received this review copy through Netgalley and I’m leaving this review voluntarily. Huge thank you to TBR and Beyond Tours for having me on this book tour!</i>

Five Survive is an adrenaline filled, claustrophobic literary ride in an ironically stranded RV. First off, there are six people in this story and the title clearly states that Five Survive. If that’s not enough to make you constantly question what happens next then I don’t know what is.

Six friends are on the road to Spring Break when they become stranded in the middle of nowhere with no phone service. That’s bad enough until the situation becomes a nightmare. It’s no accident where or how they’re stranded when it becomes apparent that somewhere out in the night is a sniper with an agenda–hand over one of the six who is keeping a secret and the rest can go on their way.

As the temperatures rise and the walls feel like they’re closing in on the 31 foot long trailer, tempers escalate and you begin to realize that everyone has some kind of secret.

I loved this book. The tension was palpable. The whole scenario is an intense, pulse-pounding situation. They’re all trapped in a trailer that’s 31 feet long. As the hours go by the stress factors get higher and higher–it gets hotter, time’s running out, and then there’s always paranoia. There are actual bullets flying–this book is no joke. Easily one of the most exciting reads I’ve had this year. It’s so intense that you actually feel as though you’re trapped with him in 31 feet of hell.

You need to put it at the top of your list. This my favorite book so far this year!