Mira is flying home for Christmas. Her family has been through a lot recently, and even though she’s only a teenager, Mira carries the weight of making sure everyone (namely her mother) is okay. Unfortunately, her connecting flight to Pittsburgh is cancelled due to an impending blizzard. She’s not that far from home and she’s desperate. Luckily, her neighbor on her first flight, Harper, is renting a car and will be driving through Pittsburgh, so Mira hops into a car with Harper and three other strangers. Along the drive, Mira starts to worry that maybe the blizzard they’re driving through isn’t the most dangerous part of the drive. Maybe it’s someone in the car with her.
The ending was telegraphed a little early for my liking. On the one hand, the mystery was gone. The concerns Mira had about who to trust and who to be wary of in the beginning of the book all rang hollow in the last half once I guessed who the antagonist was. On the other, the tension was increased with each interaction between the protagonist and the antagonist even when this person’s identity was revealed yet. I think the shift would have worked really well from distrust of all to absolute fear of one if the switch had occurred
later in the book.
I appreciated the single POV (with the exception of a few letters sprinkled throughout). The consistency in POV served the theme of dealing with strangers. We only knew about the other strangers what they told us without any internal monologue or thought process. Without that insider knowledge, I was always wondering how much I could really trust what they were saying. I was forced to wrestle with that uncertainty right along with Mira.