49 pages • 1 hour read
Natalie D. RichardsFive Total Strangers
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Mira
Mira is the protagonist and first-person narrator of the novel. Mira is a mature high school senior, traveling alone at Christmas from her father’s home in California to her mother’s home in Pennsylvania. Mira is so quiet and responsible that people assume she is a college student. However, Mira’s confidence hides her deep-seated, Unexplored Grief over the death of her beloved Aunt Phoebe a year ago. Mira is so concerned about her mother’s grief that she never gave herself the opportunity to deal with her own loss—or rather, she uses the pretext of her mother’s feelings to avoid confronting her own. This motivates the choices Mira makes that move the plot forward, as Mira feels anxious to return home quickly for the anniversary of her aunt’s death, which causes her to place herself in a dangerous situation.
While Mira is confident and mature, she has little life experience. Because of her youth and her overwhelming anxiety regarding her mother’s emotional well-being, Mira makes several decisions that have unexpected consequences. The first is her decision to allow Harper to believe she is a college student, which gives Harper the wrong impression about Mira’s ability to make adult decisions. Through Mira’s dishonesty, Harper’s innocuous offer to help becomes dangerous for both of them. Mira’s anxieties also lead to her choice to ride to Philadelphia with Harper and her new companions, all strangers. What seems like a good solution to Mira’s problems places her in isolation with a person who has been stalking her for a year. Mira also makes the choice not to tell her mother or other adults who she is traveling with—another attempt to protect her mother’s emotional state. This decision limits the information Mira’s family has should something go wrong. All of these choices develop Mira’s character and paint her as a caring, naive young person, doing her best with the information available but without experience in adult decision-making.
As the novel continues, the ability to make choices is taken out of Mira’s hands. Mira is placed in multiple dangerous situations outside of her control, limiting her ability to protect herself. Further, Mira’s trust in the people around her is severely compromised, leading her to trust the wrong people and ignore her own instincts. In the end, Mira makes choices based in fear rather than a clear-eyed assessment of the facts. By the novel’s conclusion, Mira recognizes that her failure to deal with her own grief led to her difficulties, showing character growth even in the single day that the novel occurs.
Harper
Harper is a college student from an affluent family. Harper is introduced in Chapter 1 as Mira’s seat companion, and she decides to rent a car to drive home during a snowstorm rather than wait in the airport for flights to reschedule. This choice is the catalyst that brings together the group of companions and sets the plot in motion. While Harper is in the airport, she gets a phone call from her mother explaining that her father has been arrested in connection with his work as a financial executive. At the time, Harper chooses to share this with only Brecken, and the fact that she is obviously keeping a secret leads to distrust among the other students she travels with.
As the novel progresses, Harper alternately features as a nervous driver, often relinquishing control of her rented SUV to Brecken, which places him in the position of decision-maker. As the product of a happy and financially stable home life, Harper also has limited ability to sympathize with heavy topics such as drug use and grief. As a result, Harper comes off as untrustworthy and a little shallow. However, as the novel progresses and more of Harper’s secrets are revealed, it becomes clear that while Harper appears to be untouched by the realities of the world, she has difficulties in her home life as well.
Brecken
Brecken is like Harper in that he grew up in an affluent family with more advantages than others in the car. Sharing similarities, he and Harper become good friends quickly. Brecken is present when Harper gets the call about her father’s legal troubles and supports her in that moment. However, keeping that information secret creates a bubble around Harper and Brecken that allows their companions to question their motivations—a distrust exploited by Josh.
Brecken appears to be the driving force behind many of the bad things that happen on the trip. Brecken is the one who first suggests they alter their route, a choice that places them in the mountains at the height of the storm. Brecken also makes the decision to drive away from the gas station rather than find a way to pay for the tank of gas he put in the SUV. It is also Brecken who is behind the wheel when Corey is run over. Finally, Josh’s missing book is found in Brecken’s bag. All these things suggest Brecken is behind the missing items and by extension the anonymous letters to Mira.
At the end of the book, the reader discovers that Brecken is just a misguided young adult doing everything he could to help Harper get home during a crisis. It is also clear that Josh manipulated Brecken to make him appear guilty. In the end, Brecken turns out to be the good guy he swore he was, despite how Josh made him look.
Josh
Josh initially seems an almost pathetic character, quiet, moody, and suffering from a knee injury. Mira sits between him and Kayla in the SUV. As the novel progresses, Josh remains quiet, often reading a book. However, when important decisions need to be made, Josh speaks up or takes action. During the discussion of whether to alter the route, Josh favors moving up into the mountains. When they cannot find the money to pay for gas, Brecken claims that Josh urged him to drive away without paying. When the group runs from the gas station owner, it is Josh who directs Brecken to get off the road by driving into a camping area. Josh is also one of the only people in the SUV who studies his phone’s GPS and encourages alterations to their route. When the five companions are confronted by the gas station owner and Corey, Josh is in the front passenger seat, and Brecken accuses him of moving the steering wheel to cause them to hit Corey. Finally, when the group must turn around to avoid a fallen tree, Josh is one of the loudest supporters of taking a road that is clearly unsafe, causing them to end up in a ditch.
While these actions could be benign, once it is revealed that Josh is the stalker, it is clear that Josh manipulated the entire ordeal in order to isolate Mira, as he threatened in his letters. While appearing quiet and physically helpless, Josh reveals himself to be completely healthy and quite influential in all the important decisions made during this road trip. The degree to which Josh manipulates events suggests long-term planning and thus reveals both his intelligence and his potential for violence.
Kayla
Kayla is the least developed character in the SUV but also one of the most important. Kayla is quiet and rarely interacts with the others. However, behind the scenes, she is struggling with a drug addiction that allows Josh to manipulate her; on his orders, she helps him separate Mira from the others and incapacitates her. Symbolically, Kayla is grief personified, so overwhelmed by the death of her brother that she is addicted to drugs and accepts a ride to seemingly nowhere from a group of strangers. She works as a mirror for Mira, showing the impacts of grief when it is not dealt with properly.
