They call themselves “The Survivors” – a group of high school students who survived a horrific crash involving two vans transporting students and teachers on a school trip. Every year they get together to commemorate the anniversary of the accident and remember the other students and teachers who died, only this year it feels like someone is watching them. And then one of the survivors disappears…
I put this book on my list to read after reading another of the author’s books, The Last to Vanish. I enjoyed that book and the setting so I was excited to dive into this one. Unfortunately, I didn’t love this book as much as The Last to Vanish.
This book is told in two timelines, the present which unfolds over the week the survivors get together, and the past which covers the seven hours after the crash and is told in reverse chronological order. I didn’t really love the way the accident storyline was written. I found it super confusing trying to remember everything and concoct the storyline in my head. I get where the author was going with this, trying to build up the suspense about what happened and who pulled through, but I thought it was a little difficult to understand.
The good part about the past timeline is that each hour is told from a different survivor’s point of view. The present time is told from only one point of view – Cassidy. Because there are so many characters and we only get Cassidy’s point of view it was a bit challenging to keep everyone straight and get to know the characters. I felt like a lot of the characters didn’t have a lot of development and because of that, I wasn’t invested as I could have been.
I also wasn’t sure where this book was going to go. Were members of the group slowly going to start disappearing one by one? Was someone going to end up dead? There was a bit of a locked room element in that the group meets for a week at a beach house and there is a big storm coming in that has the potential to trap them at the house. The book was a bit slow at times and I never felt any urgency that something terrible would happen.
I did like the ending though and I was not expecting the extra extra twist.
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