The Five by Lily White

My rating: 5 of 5 stars.

Incredibly dark and original, it certainly brought out strong emotions!

This book was crazy! It was very well written and I liked how it was laid out. It starts at a police station where a police psychologist is being put on a murder case where a bunch of people were brutally murdered at a house party and one girl survived. She was found tied to a bed in the upstairs bedroom after having been beaten. The cops didn’t get anywhere in questioning her because she had no memory of what happened.

So the psychologist, a man named Justin, goes to the home of the young woman to interview her on what happened that night. The girl’s name is Rainey Summer Day and she lives in a bad part of town all alone. She won’t talk about what happened that night but wants to begin by talking about the first day she moved in to the neighborhood and how she met her neighbors next door.

Justin ends up returning each day to hear more of Rainey’s story which is a very dark and depressing tale of how she is used and abused by just about every man in her life, but especially by the neighbors next door. There is a father and four brothers the youngest of which, Rowen, has a crush on her and later becomes her friend but on that first day, his oldest brother Jacob tells him to get lost while he trades pot for sex with her.

It isn’t long before the father and another brother are using her the same way, and her life goes downhill from there. Her story is like a very slow train wreck that you are watching and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t take your eyes off of it. You keep hoping that she will do something to get it back on track but she never does. Rowan is such a good kid and though he is a few years younger than her, it is hard to watch how his brothers treat him and how she constantly hurts him.

Though she continues to tell him that she isn’t worthy of him and he needs to find someone better than her, deep down she does love him and keeps doing awful things with his brothers and father right in front of him. I pretty much hated her for most of the book, but also felt bad for her, even though most of the stuff that happened to her was really her own fault.

I don’t want to give any more away, but there are more people around her that have died so Justin has to figure out if she is in any way involved in the deaths. It isn’t until the very end that you find out what happened that night at the party. Though there are plenty of clues along the way. Either way, this book is very different than anything I have ever read before and though I didn’t really like Rainey, I liked the love story between her and Rowan. I was in tears quite a few times during this book.

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