Five, Ilona Bannister (Review by Omonivie Williams)

Rating: 5.0/5 Stars

Five people wait for the 7:06 train to London Victoria. Emma, the single mom, the socialite, the lunatic. Gideon, the child, the genius, the psychopath. Liam, the businessman, the savior, the narcissist. Ms. Worth, the doctor, the mother, the daughter. Sonny, the son, the lover, the screw-up. Over the span of five minutes, across 230 pages, you will grow to fear them, hate them, love them. In five minutes, one of them will die. Five forces readers to look beneath the surface. Inevitably, you may form biases. It acknowledges this, and it forces us to confront them. Every second is precious, and Ilona Bannister immediately grabs the reader’s attention in a race against time as we delve deeper into the lives of each character and the events and people that turned them into who they are today. Reminiscent of The Breakfast Club, Ilona Bannister manages to perfectly encapsulate the messiness of life, creating well-rounded, painstakingly human characters you can’t help but get attached to. Still, our time with them is running out. The train is coming soon.
Ilona Bannister’s blameless, omnipotent voice, with a humorous edge, forces us to become both a detective and a character in the novel; to take a stance and to hold us accountable for our biases. Rich with intertextuality, not a single sentence is wasted. Every detail is a clue, falling into place to create a story that explores neurodiversity and puts us as the reader in uncomfortable situations that reveal a lot about the current state of the world. Heart-wrenching and unapologetic, I couldn’t put the book down. Still, I found I almost didn’t want to turn the page each time, if just to keep the characters alive a bit longer. I do not think any of them are good people. No one is perfect, of course, least of all these five. Still, I do not want any of them to die. Neither will you.