Five Survive by Holly Jackson
I think A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (detailed review coming soon - once I finish watching the show!) might be it for me re: Holly Jackson because I wasn’t impressed by Not Quite Dead Yet or Five Survive. I like the premise of both, and if they were each about 200 pages max, I think they’d be amazing. But that was also my issue with As Good As Dead - definitely too wordy, too much internal thinking. Cutting a lot of that and keeping a tight pace with concise writing would have made that book so much better, and I think the same of the other I previously mentioned.
In Five Survive… wow. I think ALL of that RV curtain mess could have been cut, because what did it even matter? A lot of the internal waffling started grating on my nerves. The story itself was interesting, good twist that wasn’t what I predicted from the get-go, and the cliffhanger chapter endings kept me turning pages. But in between those cliffhangers, I almost put the book down several times. It was enough to make me wonder if Jackson wrote the book and an editor told her it needed to be # pages, so she had to add a lot to it.
That said, the concept was phenomenal - I love the idea of an "accident" stranding these teens and making them sitting ducks, and then raising the stakes by making it a purposeful issue. Everything took place in one location over eight hours, and that ticking clock made the story really compelling. I felt like the characters weren't too well-developed, which should have been the top priority considering it was only six people in an RV - why not spend time getting to know them instead of obsessing over the curtains? Instead, they were very generalized. Oliver was too awful, too easy to hate. Red was too pathetic. Maddy was so bland, the only thing I remember about her is that she looked like Red. Etc etc. I think there was a lot of potential here, but it just didn't hit home for me.