Five Total Strangers written by Natalie Richards
17yo-Mira lives with her dad in California and attends a prestigious art school and she’s flying back to spend the Christmas holiday with her mother in Pittsburgh, PA. During her layover, a blizzard hits and she’s stranded at the airport. She hitches a ride with a group of college kids who were on her flight and they try to brave the storm.

As the storm worsens, things start to go immediately wrong and get weirder as the story goes on and Mira realizes she has no idea who these strangers are and apparently they don’t know each other either. This YA thriller has locked-room vibes as Mira continues to stick with her companions and things go from bad to worse.

I read this for the Big Library Read with Libby in November. I like a good fast-paced thriller and the concept was intriguing. At 17, I’d probably do something as equally dumb like hitch a ride in a storm to get back to my family and lie to them about who I was with. While the concept is good, execution could have been better and there were too many coincidences to make it believable.