Published on July 9th, 2019 by Delacorte Press
Genre: Speculative fiction, horror
Pages: 368
Source: Publisher
Goodreads
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It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her.
It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything.
But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. And when she does, Hetty learns that there's more to their story, to their life at Raxter, than she could have ever thought true.
Trigger warnings: a group of people are gassed, two suicides, body horror/gore, guns
Have you ever read a book that felt like it was written just for you?
From the very first page, I knew I was going to love Wilder Girls. Hetty's voice was so easy for me to sink into, almost like a slightly more polished stream of consciousness. The world she's stuck in was so fascinating to me, the Tox so sickening and grim right from the start. I just dropped everything and couldn't put it down once I started. I haven't stayed up until the wee hours of the morning just for a book in a very, very long time, but I had to do that for this one.
The life on Raxter is turning monstrous. Not just the wildlife, like the feral deer or the oversize coyotes or the rabid bears, but the girls too. The Tox, a mysterious disease ravaging through the island, came in a year and a half ago and turned the students of this small boarding school in alien, horror versions of themselves. Girls are coughing up teeth, growing gills, their hands are scaling over, their spines are growing ridges. And it's not in any way pretty or romanticized. The disgusting effects from the Tox are just that--disgusting. There's no prettying up of what's happening here, so if you're at all affected by body horror, proceed with caution. This book is gruesome and ugly, just the way I like them. And I was absolutely dying to find out what was causing it. As each flare-up got worse and worse, as each girl dropped, her fingers turning black and her eyes going lifeless, the panic in me rose to fever levels. I couldn't turn the page fast enough.
Hetty, Reese, and Byatt were everything. I loved each of these three girls with my whole heart. I loved Byatt's sureness, her confidence, the traces of Bad Girl and unlikeability in the face of everything happening around her. I loved her friendship with Hetty, the way they'd do anything for each other. I loved quite literally everything about Reese. Give me an angry closed off girl with a trigger finger, glowing hair, and a crush on her best friend, and I am putty in your hands. And then there was Hetty. Strong, adaptable, proactive Hetty who is wracked by guilt and shame and pushes those feelings down down down so she can do what needs to be done. I loved these girls, I can't say it enough. Their emotions felt so real to me, the reactions to one another's actions. Their jealousies and their softness for one another, how they always had each other's backs. And I really appreciated how it never felt like one was the third wheel. You just can't imagine the three of them without each other, which makes the events in this book even more painful.
This book was so many things at once and it pulled it all off so well. It was horror, first of all, terrifying and gory, the kind of horror that makes your skin crawl with imaginary wounds and bugs. It felt a lot like a post-apocalyptic story, with how cut off from the rest of the world these girls were. Surviving without heat or electricity, eating expired, rationed food, fighting each other the barest necessities like blankets and stale crackers. It also had a sort of zombie outbreak movie quality to it. You know that feeling when they discover patient zero at, say, a medical facility, and everything goes to shit? There were parts of this novel that felt like that, though there aren't any actual zombies in it.
Oh, and the book is hella, hella gay, too.
Wilder Girls was everything I wanted it to be. It felt like a mirror reflecting back the worst traits of humanity, our monstrousness, and it terrified me. It scared me and creeped me out in the way all body horror does. I'm constantly longing for darker, grittier, worse worse worse, and Rory Power freaking delivered. Bad girls, monsters, survival, and a terrifying disease. If a feminist Lord of the Flies meets horror, monsters, and plagues sounds like you're idea of a good time (it sounds like mine!) then you really, really need to pick this book up. It was incredible.
Love the sound of this one! :)
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