Five Total Strangers

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.