Sometimes you just want to read what you want to read when you want to read it. And so it was with The Only Survivors, Megan Miranda’s newest thriller. I borrowed it as soon as it came in to the library and blew through it in just a few days. It’s a slim novel—less than 350 pages—and Miranda’s prose reads super quickly while the story sucks you in. It’s suspenseful and tense, and there are two crucial twists towards the end, one of which you may see coming and the other you won’t… though when you read it, a recurring observation made by the narrator throughout the narrative makes sense. I’ve previously reviewed several of Miranda’s previous adult and YA thrillers here on the blog.
A decade ago nine students climbed out of the watery wreckage of two passenger vans and clawed their way up a slippery ravine along an isolated, rural road. Their school vans having careened off the windy road and crashed into a raging river amid a violent storm, the surviving students are forced to save themselves. However, ten students and two teachers perished that night, and a year on from the terrible tragedy one of their number, unable to cope with the trauma of that night, died by suicide. The remaining survivors have struggled to heal the trauma and overcome the survivors’ guilt ever since. So now each year for the anniversary the eight that are left meet at the same beach house for a week to make sure everyone’s okay—and that no one’s talking out of turn to any outsiders about what really happened in the ravine that awful night.
Cassidy Bent is one of those survivors. She has worked hard over the past year to disentangle herself from the group chats and the email threads and the claustrophobic group by changing her number and sending their emails straight to the spam folder, which is how she misses the news of another survivor’s death as well as that person’s final attempt at reaching out to her in the days preceding it. And though she has every intention of blowing off this year’s annual beach gathering in the final act of severance from the group, an anonymous text containing the obituary forces Cassidy to return to the beach house for one last week with this group of people who aren’t her friends, whom she doesn’t trust, whom she knows would turn on her in an instant for the sake of self-preservation.
After Amaya, the organizer of the annual gathering, withdraws to a nearby campground and stops answering calls and texts even in the midst of a major storm that briefly cuts the group off from the mainland, Cassidy realizes that the group is under covert surveillance, that someone has been digging into the group’s account of that night and asking each of them to confirm particular details of that night that only one of their number would know. Someone is poking, unsettling, attempting to turn them against each other—but who is it and for what ends? And why now all these years later?
There are many questions about just what happened that night. From what sent the vans veering off the road to what transpired amongst the immediate survivors in the interim between the crash and their rescue after climbing out of the ravine. And Miranda answers these questions in chapters told from each survivor’s perspective that regress in time from the ninth hour after the crash when they were rescued back to first hour of the ordeal.
The tension that exists among the group members is only exacerbated by their habit of communicating carefully and by subtext lest they are forced to face the choices they made that night. As a result Cassidy is unsure of whom to trust and left adrift alone in a sea of doubt and mystery—until it’s almost too late.
The Only Survivors examines the aftermath of trauma and tragedy—and the cost of what it takes to survive catastrophe.
A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews 