The Only Survivors

My April Book of the Month selection was The Only Survivors by Megan Miranda (the other options were Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls, Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfield, Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling, Adelaide by Genevieve Wheeler, Ana Maria and the Fox by Liana De la Rosa, and Advika and the Hollywood Wives by Kirthana Ramisetti). I picked this because I really liked Miranda's previous novel, All The Missing Girls, and I enjoyed this one just as much.  Ten years ago Cassidy Brent and eight other students survived a tragic accident with multiple fatalities involving two vans on a school trip. When one of the survivors commits suicide on the one year anniversary of the crash, the others decide to meet every year at a beach house on the Outer Banks in order to keep tabs on each other. After ten years Cassidy begins to feel like the retreat is doing her more harm than good so she decides not to go but she changes her mind when another survivor commits suicide. Now there are only seven of them at the beach house and tensions are already running high after another survivor goes missing and a terrible storm threatens the coast. However, when Cassidy discovers that one of them may have been revealing the damaging secrets about the accident that they have been keeping all of these years, she begins to wonder what each of them are still willing to do to survive. There is one timeline in the present from Cassidy's POV over the course of the seven days at the beach house and another one in the past revealing the events surrounding the crash from every survivor's POV in reverse chronological order. This narrative structure is very effective because it kept me engaged and reading well into the night (All The Missing Girls also uses this structure). It is a slow-burn mystery so I definitely found the timeline in the past to be more compelling because all of the emerging details about the accident eventually inform what is going on in the present. There is an incredibly tense atmosphere because of the storm, which keeps them trapped in the house without electricity, and because of all of the secrets and the tension keeps escalating as Cassidy comes to suspect each survivor of misdeeds both in the present and in the past. There are lots of twists and turns, and a bit of misdirection, that kept me guessing until the very end with a startling revelation about the crash that I was not expecting. I also really enjoyed the exploration of survivor's guilt and how trauma impacts people and keeps them from moving on. My only complaint is that Miranda uses a very complex syntax with lots of clauses separated by commas and I often had to reread certain sentences in order for them to make sense but this did not detract from my enjoyment. This is a thoroughly engrossing psychological thriller that I highly recommend to fans of the genre.