71 pages • 2 hours read
Holly JacksonFive Survive
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Holly Jackson, Mysteries, and True-Crime Podcasts
Holly Jackson, born in Buckingham, England, in 1992, became a best-selling writer in 2019 with the publication of her first novel, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, the first in a series, followed by Good Girl, Bad Blood (2020), Kill Joy (2021), and As Good As Dead (2021). Like Five Survive, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is also a young adult crime fiction novel, in which the protagonist, Pip, tries to solve a five-year-old murder-suicide case as part of a school project. The victim, Andrea “Andie” Bell, and the accused, Salil “Sal” Singh, were both students at Pip’s school.
Jackson has highlighted her fascination with crimes and mysteries in several interviews, noting that A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder wouldn’t exist without the influence of true-crime podcasts. The novel’s structure follows the format of true-crime podcasts as well, with much of the story being presented as diary pages, interview scripts, and other forms of media. In contrast, Five Survive is more linear and traditionally prose-like in structure. The entire plot takes place over eight hours, and apart from Red’s flashbacks of her mom, the narrative is chronological and fast-paced. Jackson explained that on average, her books take eight hours to read, and she wanted to write a novel that took place in real time, unfolding over the same number of hours it took to read it.
Literary Context: Closed-Circle Mysteries
Closed-circle mysteries are a subgenre of crime and detective fiction. Two of the most notable genre features are remote settings and a limited number of suspects for a crime, which is usually murder. Closed-circle mysteries often overlap with locked-room mysteries, another crime and mystery subgenre. While locked-room mysteries typically take place in a single room, closed-circle mysteries can take place anywhere isolated and contained.
Jackson uses both setting tropes in Five Survive. Red and her friends are stranded inside an RV in the middle of nowhere—a locked room within an isolated landscape—and one of them knows the secret the sniper wants. Another well-known feature of this subgenre is an increasingly claustrophobic environment, which Jackson also employs in Five Survive as the environment inside the RV becomes more hostile.
Agatha Christie, the famous British writer who wrote and contributed to the golden age of detective fiction, wrote many closed-circle mysteries. Some of Christie’s best-known works were closed-circle mysteries, including Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, and Death on the Nile. By writing in this genre, Jackson calls on a robust literary canon, similar to her contemporaries like Lucy Foley, another British author, who wrote The Guest List. This genre continues to be popular in both literature and film, with recent blockbusters Knives Out and Glass Onion as examples of closed-circle mysteries.
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