The title and the cover led me to expect that this would be an action-packed thriller, but in fact it's much more than this. Mhairi is a tough and emotionally scarred survivor, and on her way to her grandmother across the Scottish border on the Isle of Arran. She is initially reluctant to help the mute boy who she meets en route, but soon they form a bond, and it becomes imperative to her to get him to safety too, as they travel through a country flooded with desperate refugees.
Mhairi is a resourceful and articulate character, and her hardness make her initially hard to like, but by the end of the novel I was fighting back tears because I cared so much for her, Mo and Peter. Whilst you could read the Survival Game purely as a thriller, it is ultimately a novel about love, responsibility and the sort of world we want to live in.
If I have one quibble, it's that Scotland, and Arran come out of the story looking slightly tarnished , and I had thought that Scottish islands had quite a good track record of welcoming refugees. However, Survival Game stands as a warning for the future, and I will be recommending it to teen readers.

I agreed to give an honest review in exchange for an advance copy from net galley.

Did not finish at 63%
I'm very into post apocalyptic novels and thought that this sounded right up my alley. I was disappointed. Firstly the formatting of the ebook made it very difficult to read, I assume because of the placement of certain words in the text. (She uses the word Castle when she tries to repress certain thoughts but in ebook format it obscures the text and messes up the formatting)
Despite that taking you out of the story and the constant alluding to past events I couldn't connect with Mhari. She felt far too self possessed for someone who was so deep in denial and she had the Dawson Creek effect of using vocabulary way too advanced for someone of her age group.
I finally gave up and let her continue her journey alone.