2.75⭐ rounded up to 3⭐
This was a Fear Street that started out good and had a lot of promise, at least for me, as someone who's a fan of wilderness/survival type stories.
Three teen girls decide to go on a camping trip out in the forest as a girls only getaway, but when they just so happen to encounter three good-looking college guys, they become smitten and decide to do some hiking together.
A series of strange and dangerous incidents occur whilst on their camping trip, giving us a sense of foreboding - and misfortune for our main character as she endures a few mishaps and minor injuries.
After the girls set up camp for the night with the guys they just met, they awaken the next morning to inadvertently discover the dead body of one of them. From there, things quickly escalate and their situation turns into a fight for survival against both mother nature and the villains who may or may not be involved in the death of the guy.
This is one I was kind of excited for and really enjoying the first half of. Again, I tend to like stories in this kind of setting and this one was no exception. It doesn't waste a lot of time in setting up characters or backstory or dishing out fakeout scares and cliffhangers. It jumps right into the action and moves along smoothly from there, which I really appreciated about it.
After the girls discover the body, things take a bit of a different direction than I expected, and while what we got in terms of this shift in the story was filled with moments of tension and suspense, which might arguably be the book's strong-points, it left some gaps in logic and decision making by the characters that I had a hard time ignoring...
...which brings me to the negatives that really held this back for me; from turning this potentially 4⭐ book into a 3⭐ one. There were some opportunities our main characters could have made that would have gotten them out of their crisis a little more easily; there were some decisions the villians made that seemed unlikely, but there simply to drive the plot; and there were some contrivances leading up to the discovery of the body - not to mention the entire setup of which felt like it needed just a bit more context to be convincing.
Another thing that kind of bugged me were the secondary characters, Beth and Ellen, who seem to take a backseat in the story in the second half and say and do virtually nothing to help out or even attempt to resolve their situation.
I could see someone enjoying this more if you are willing to suspend your disbelief to some degree and not be annoyed by idiotic or unbelievable characters (these types of books sometimes require that anyway), but in this particular story I had a hard time looking past some of these issues and logical gaps, and I feel the pros and cons of this weigh up pretty evenly, so I settled on a flat 3/5⭐.
But I still enjoyed it, it had some decent action in it, some moments of intensity we don't see in these, and of course a lush wilderness setting that always makes me happy to see/read about it.