Getting Involved

As I mildly predicted in early March, there was enough mystery involved in Zahira's Young Adult novel Five Total Strangers to force me to read it over the last 24 hours. It was easy to see the pleasures Natalie D. Richards had to offer to her readership, which I suspect is a bit younger than the age of her protagonist, Mia (who is 18), and is likely to be predominantly, if not exclusively, female. I'm not, by the way, implying that the novel would have been in any way easy to write - simply that it has been carefully and skilfully crafted with its very specific audience in mind.

I'm happy to report that I guessed at the villain, and I think most experienced readers would, but, again, I'm not implying this is a deficiency. Indeed, for the first two-thirds of the story I was reasonably baffled as to what was going on and the 'unbaffling' was done in a generally fair manner - though there were a series of massive coincidences involving a major red herring that I wouldn't regard as quite cricket.

Indeed, the atmosphere generated by the writer made up for minor plot deficiencies. The descriptions of the blizzard in which the titular strangers are caught for almost the full length of the narrative are wonderfully detailed and entirely convincing, adding considerably to the persistent sense of menace. And the key characters are nicely rendered, being as off-putting and petty as cleverish students often are.

Unfortunately for me I didn't find the narrator, Mia, relatable (as pretty much everyone says these days, so I'll join in and say it myself.) To be honest, I thought she was an entitled, self-obsessed bit of a pain - but, then, of course I would think that of a character that I suspect most 14-year-old young ladies would aspire to imitate. So, again, evidence of the skill of the novelist (though I do wonder whether even Ms Richards might have felt she was piling it on with the (necessarily?) yucky ending.)