Five Total Strangers- Natalie D. Richards

Five Total Strangers- Natalie D. Richards

I pronounce 2 cats (How much I enjoyed the book 2/5) and 4 knives (knives are how badly the author butchered the ending 4/5). A perfect book for anyone looking for a slow, predictable story, with unbelievable characters and an unsatisfying end.

🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️

***Warning- Spoilers and Lots of them.

What I enjoyed about this book was that it had such potential for a really cool twist!

At first I was kind of annoyed with all of the, “Girl Power!” & “I can do it myself without any help from the guys,” inauthentic drivel sprinkled liberally throughout the text. But then I decided that maybe, just maybe the author was smarter than I was giving her credit for. It was, after all,  a New York Times Best Selling Author and on several school reading lists.  So maybe the main character’s stalker was actually a woman!!! Dun-dun-dahhhh! Mic drop baby! Legit football player touch down dance.

I started to pay more attention to the short pieces where the stalker talked about Mira and decided wow, wouldn’t that be refreshing? A writer who actually, truly believed that a girl could do anything a guy can do. Including stalk and kill her victim.

But alas. That was not the case. The stalker was the completely predictable, quiet teenage boy in the backseat pretending to have the broken leg. Yes, it was really that bad.

The only worse ending would have been if the stalker turned out to be the creepy man in a yellow hat who somehow, without a vehicle, managed to arrive hours ahead of them to pretty much all of their random highway stops, like the gas station and the bar, in a blizzard. Nothing could stop him from getting there first and sitting creepily in the corner. Not saying anything and not talking to people around him.  Eventually he threatened that if they didn’t help him, they would be sorry. And that was it. *Spoiler Alert* They were never sorry. They didn’t ever pick him up. And they never saw him again…Umm….that was weird.

Perhaps Natalie D. Richards goal was to write something meaningful that checked ALL of the teenage boxes. She included: abuse, depression, loss, anxiety, drug use, cancer, divorce, feminism, friends, family and a plethora of other teenage buzz subjects. But all of them fell flat.

I would have quit this book halfway through: My motto is, “Life is too short to finish a bad book.” But I was out on a long run and I didn’t want to mess up my split times to stop and change books. 😜🤸‍♀️ Even so, the pace was slow and not much happened. And then, the last 5% of the book waaaaaaayyy too much happened and none of it made much sense.

I was left with so many questions. An important one to the entire book was, who was Josh aka the stalker and why had he started stalking Mira? I wanted him to be so much more three dimensional. How was he on her exact same flights and why did he accept a ride from Harper if main character Mira had already told her no and wasn’t planning on going in the car? Why did Josh aka the stalker steal everyone’s stuff? How did they not find the stalker letters when they were searching through bags for everyone’s missing stuff and shouldn’t he have been nervous about that? Why did Josh keep sabotaging the car ride? He would have wanted to get Mira home and away from other people as much as she wanted to get home. What was up with the man in the yellow hat. He may as well been wearing a shirt that said World’s Lamest Red Herring across the front. It seems overly convenient that Josh dies in the end so that he isn’t around to answer any of these questions.

Some people enjoyed it more than me. If nothing else you can pick it up just to have a good chuckle at the ridiculousness of it all. It feels a little like the spoof shows Vampires Suck or Scary Movie where they make fun of really bad teenage movies. Only it’s not supposed to be satire.

Therefore, I pronounce again 2 cats (How much I enjoyed the book 2/5) and 4 knives (knives are how badly the author butchered the ending 4/5). A perfect book for anyone looking for a slow, predictable story, with unbelievable characters and an unsatisfying end.

🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️