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.
Themes
The Consequences of Dishonesty and Distrust
One of the main themes of this novel is the importance of trust and honesty . Notably, Natalie D. Richards introduces the theme via the protagonist’s dishonesty: On the first page, Mira allows Harper to believe that Mira is a college student rather than a high school senior. Mira’s deception is passive and unmalicious, but it contributes to the dangerous situation she later finds herself in by encouraging Harper to offer her a ride. It also hints at Mira’s unreliable narration, injecting distrust between Mira and the reader.
The lies and secrets build as the group drives to Pennsylvania. The first lie to emerge is who actually paid for the rental SUV. Everyone believes Harper rented it, but they later learn that Brecken paid the majority of the bill. It further emerges that Brecken helped Harper because he overheard a phone call Harper took from her mother revealing her father’s arrest for a financial issue at work. Though told to protect another person (Harper), these lies and secrets cause distrust among the five strangers in the SUV. Other understandable deceptions likewise prove to have dangerous consequences; Kayla’s desire to cover up her drug use is reasonable, but her obvious lie that nothing has gone missing from her bag further heightens the atmosphere of suspicion.
As more and more things disappear, it becomes clear that someone in the car is lying about taking these items, but each time the group attempts to find the items, they fail to come up with conclusive evidence to accuse one particular person. Brecken and Josh frequently make accusations, all of which are unfounded but make the car’s occupants more paranoid than ever. At the same time, the fact that everyone is apparently lying about something makes it harder and harder to sort out the consequential lies from the harmless ones; Mira wastes valuable mental energy pursuing red herrings while overlooking the signs of Josh’s dishonesty. For instance, she sees danger in a stranger in a yellow hat who happens to show up at several locations where the five strangers pull off the road. This man turns out to be benign, even coming to Mira’s rescue at the end of the novel. Richards hammers home just how faulty Mira’s instincts have become via dramatic irony, including letter fragments that give the reader access to more information than Mira and reveal the full extent of the danger she’s in.
Mira later blames her inability to read her instincts on failing to deal with her grief over the death of her Aunt Phoebe—a form of self-deception. The novel thus suggests that even well-intentioned or sympathetic dishonesty is dangerous, destabilizing one’s perceptions from both within and without.
Unexplored Grief
Grief that remains unexplored or repressed factors heavily in this novel. A year before the novel begins, Mira loses her Aunt Phoebe. Aunt Phoebe encouraged Mira to become an artist, and this loss has had a profound impact on her. However, after Phoebe’s death, Mira focuses on her mother because Phoebe was her mother’s twin. Mira’s conviction that her mother won’t survive her grief gives Mira an excuse not to deal with her own.
This unprocessed grief becomes an impediment to Mira making good choices. Mira is so focused on her mother’s emotional state that she gets into a car with four strangers rather than safely wait for her flight to be rescheduled. Grief also causes her to focus on the man in the yellow hat as a danger because his smell reminds her of the disinfectant that was used in the hospital where Phoebe died. These things are connected directly to Mira’s refusal to deal with her own emotions, and they make it possible for her to sit beside Josh in the SUV and not recognize him as someone she met not once but twice before.
Mira is not the only passenger dealing with a loss: It eventually emerges that Kayla lost her brother. Kayla’s addiction is a direct response to that loss and figuratively parallels Mira’s self-deception. Kayla has literally altered her consciousness to avoid dealing with the pain of her brother’s death. In a different way, Josh himself embodies Mira’s unacknowledged grief. Tellingly, he saw her for the first time at the hospital and has haunted her ever since.
At the end of the novel, Mira’s mother corrects Mira’s opinion on her mother’s emotional turmoil and explains that Mira’s inability to deal with her own grief has prevented her from seeing obvious signs of danger around her. Mira’s grief led to her poor decisions and put her in a car with a stalker, but her deep desire to live, and the friendships she develops, save her life.
Isolation and Obsession
Isolation of various kinds features throughout the novel, driven by both the actions of Mira’s stalker and chance circumstances: a group of strangers traveling during a dangerous snowstorm. Mira’s choice to join Harper and her companions in the SUV places her in an enclosed space with people she does not know. It isolates her by cutting her off from others and placing her on a trajectory to losing her phone and becoming a pawn in the game of a stalker. The stalker’s actions isolate her as well, along with the rest of the group: Josh’s theft or sabotage of anything the group might use to contact or reach the outside world strands them in the SUV even before the vehicle itself gets stuck. It is no coincidence that his plan culminates in physically separating Mira from the others, as isolation has been his goal all along.
The secrets that each of the five strangers keep also isolate them from one another. Harper and Brecken share the secret of Harper’s family struggles, cutting the two of them off from the others. Kayla hides the secret of her drug addiction, isolating her and allowing the stalker to take advantage of her. Mira’s lie about being a college student isolates her because she feels stuck in the deception, unable to share the truth with her new acquaintances. She also keeps quiet about her grief, even to herself. This inability to confront her own feelings means she cannot ask for support from others, rendering her more alone. Richards shows that the consequences of isolation are dangerous and far-reaching. All of these characters are damaged and potentially in danger due to their inability to connect to others with trust and honesty.
One subtype of isolation the novel particularly focuses on is obsession—specifically, the stalker’s focus on Mira and their desire to make Mira see them. It soon becomes clear that the writer is trapped inside their own perspective. They view their chance encounters with Mira through the lens of a love story, and even when they realize that Mira does not share this view of events, the writer doesn’t change their own frame of reference. Instead, they lash out, acting as though Mira betrayed an existing relationship. Detached from reality and unable to show his true self to anyone until the final moments of the book, Josh is in this sense the most isolated character—a point that underscores how dangerous isolation can be.
