Blog Tour Review: Five Survive by Holly Jackson

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Thrilling, frustrating, devastating.

Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Holly Jackson for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with complimentary eARC and media kit!

Book Information

Genre: Middle Grade Graphic Novel
Published: November 8, 2022

Eight hours. Six friends. Five survive. A road trip turns deadly in this addictive YA thriller from the bestselling author of the worldwide phenomenon A GOOD GIRL’S GUIDE TO MURDER.

Red Kenny is on a road trip for spring break with five friends: Her best friend – the older brother – his perfect girlfriend – a secret crush – a classmate – and a killer.

When their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere with no cell service, they soon realize this is no accident. They have been trapped by someone out there in the dark, someone who clearly wants one of them dead.

With eight hours until dawn, the six friends must escape, or figure out which of them is the target. But is there a liar among them? Buried secrets will be forced to light and tensions inside the RV will reach deadly levels. Not all of them will survive the night. . . .

Purchase/Information Links:

• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60788826-five-survive
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Survive-Holly-Jackson/dp/0593374169/
• Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/five-survive-holly-jackson/1141932413
• Book Depository: https://www.bookdepository.com/Five-Survive/9780593704899
• Indigo: https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/five-survive/9780593374160-item.html
• IndieBound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780593374160

Content and Trigger Warnings

For a list of warnings, tropes, and representation for these book, check out BookTriggerWarnings.com.

About the Author

Holly Jackson was born in 1992. She grew up in Buckinghamshire and started writing stories from a young age, completing her first (poor) attempt at a book aged fifteen.

‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ is a YA Mystery Thriller and her debut novel. She lives in London and aside from reading and writing, she enjoys binge-playing video games and pointing out grammatical errors in street signs.

Author Links:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/hojay92
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hojay92/
• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18229614.Holly_Jackson

Review (no spoilers)

If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.

Holly Jackson is an auto-buy author for me, so when I had the opportunity to once again read one of her books as a part of a blog tour, I basically started screaming in excitement. That being said, this is going to be a difficult review to write, because I had a lot of conflicting feelings about this novel.

The book follows six friends who are road tripping across the US and find themselves lost and cut off from civilization. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that there is a trained sniper responsible for their isolation, and that they weren’t chosen by chance. One of them is hiding a secret that the sniper is willing to kill for. It’s up to them to find out who and what it is.

As with most thriller/mystery novels, the book has a few twists and turns that it throws your way. It also has a fast pace style of narration, so it’s almost guaranteed to keep your attention throughout. My main gripe with the plot was that I felt a lot of the twists were predictable and I spent most of the book being incredibly annoyed at one particular character. You know how oftentimes with isolation plots, there’s one or two characters that are despicable throughout the entire thing? This book has one of those and I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why everyone else kept putting up with them. You’re all about to die, have some agency for crying out loud!

Honestly, due to my annoyance at how the characters were behaving, I was set to give this book 3 stars. It was the ending of the book that really got to me and resulted in the higher rating. Holly Jackson is an incredible writer, and she knew exactly how to pull on my heart strings in the final few chapters. This isn’t a book with likable characters, but it is a book that will get your heart racing in some of the best ways possible.

I may not have enjoyed this as much as A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, but I would definitely recommend this for fans of YA thrillers, particularly ones with unreliable narrators and plots involving being cut off from the rest of the world.