Wilder Girls

Yarrr, here be spoilers.

This book traumatized me. I am officially Scarred. Okay, that's hyperbolic, but still. The narrative pulls absolutely no punches, and the horror is body horror (a dozen or so pages in, and it was EYE TRAUMA of a graphic nature). I appreciated the way the alternating perspectives truly showed the characters' inner selves and their differences, particularly when one of them is hospitalized, gravely ill, and heavily medicated in a way that altered her ability to process reality. Also loved that several of the primary characters were queer, without that being the main focus of the story.

I would not necessarily recommend this book to everyone, in light of the visceral horror, but it was certainly powerful. The only show more reason I didn't give it the full 5 stars is because the open ending was a little too open for my tastes. show less

This book is not for the faint of heart, it's full of extremely explicit body horror. Also, it was very good. I had to put it down and close my eyes to stop feeling nauseous a couple of times, but I kept picking it up again moments later because I needed to know what would happen.

TRIGGER WARNINGS (as stated on Rory Power’s website):
Graphic violence and body horror. Gore.
On the page character death, parental death, and animal death, though the animals are not pets.
Behavior and descriptive language akin to self harm, and references to such.
Food scarcity and starvation. Emesis.
A scene depicting chemical gassing.
Reference to suicide and suicidal ideation.
Non-consensual medical treatment.

Raxter School for Girls went under quarantine after the TOX broke out a year and a half ago. Two surviving teachers and a few girls are all that is left at the island boarding school. The TOX affects everyone differently – an extra spine, a sealed eye with something moving underneath, a silver hand… The TOX has also turned the show more wilderness beyond the school’s gates wilder than before. Hetty and her best friends Byatt and Reese, must fight for survival with the others while they wait for a cure.
Firstly, I immediately fell in love with the cover of the book – HOLY COW IT’S BEAUTIFUL! I would have this as a poster hanging in my house. The art gives the book even more beauty once you know its secrets.
As I’ve seen many other describe it, I would say the genre is “dystopian feminist horror”. The horror wasn’t a scared, tense-filled horror, but more of an uncomfortable, skin crawling horror. It was gruesome in parts, but only because it would be describing what was happening with the girls.
“It’s like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don’t know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over.”
The writing was a bit choppy in parts, but it worked because it was the character’s thought process. It was so well written I nearly read it all in one setting. I stayed with it and kept turning pages because I wanted to know what would happen to Hetty, Byatt, and Reese. I also wanted desperately to know how the TOX happened to begin with. show less

Review from September 21, 2021 (posted on Goodreads)

I am very glad I took a chance on this book. If you’re like me, either through some preconceived notions on what “young adult” fiction is, or by bad luck reading a string of kinda bad, very boring YA novels in college, you might not have the faith to pick up anything with a YA tag. Let me reassure you that there are gems in this genre, and Wilder Girls is one of them. Adults can and should read this book. The writing is pretty and disturbing. It is tender and callous. A quick read, no unnecessary density (unlike my reviews, ehehe) but a book you can lose yourself in.

Horror fans, if you are up for a book that portrays teens a little more tenderly, and you’re not afraid to tap in show more to your inner vulnerable teenager that I know you have stashed away deep inside, you will have fun with this one too. The main feast is the body horror, coming in enough variations to be a fun treat no matter what your personal favorite flavor. The medical bodily harm had my heart rate through the roof. Blood everywhere. It doesn’t dwell but it doesn’t hold back. We are given descriptions of the mutations these young girls (and the animals that roam the nearby forest) are experiencing with the detached casual feeling of someone doing their best to compartmentalize the horror in order to survive it. Side dishes include a bleak, isolated location, the constant threat of something morbid and unknown pressing in, sapping your warmth page by page, and of course children in peril. Desert is the sharp knife of survival horror, as the desperate need to not die on this horrid diseased island, relying on government supplied food drops, is a major concern to every character.

What did I think of it? It had me charmed. The first few pages reel you in by describing Hetty, the main character, and her eye (the one she’s hiding on the beautiful cover behind her hair) that has been fused shut, something moving behind it, and how her best friend Byatt helps sew shut the surface wound that reopens every once in a while. I couldn’t stop reading. From the start, their need to be understood and supported by their friends, loved ones, anyone, is universal, something we can all tap into.
Through the whole novel I was moved by the humanity of all these young ladies. They comment several times and doing what it takes to survive, and there is cruelty, violence, anger. Tough decisions. But this novel is not Lord of the Flies: through every harsh reality and hurtful mistake, these girls never completely forget their humanity. They try to do the right thing, they try to protect others, they try to absolve their guilt, even as they fight over a single moldy orange, even as they comply with their forced target practice, as they hide in the woods from monsters. They are stripped of society and civilization but are still holding the bloody scraps of what each of them actually cares about, and they refuse to let go of that. We only get glimpses into who they where before, only tiny slivers of personality can surface when they are numb from watching dozens of classmates die painful, screaming deaths and burning the corpses behind the main building. But there is enough here for all of us to connect to, as fellow humans.

A good ways into the book, there was an event with a scalpel that I read around 11:30 at night that left me feeling wired, physically writhing as I forced myself to read. They kicked it up a notch and I knew if I stopped there all I’d be thinking about all night was muscle and tendons, so I read the last 100 or so pages in a fugue state. And then the book ended, like the proper dire, horrific, betraying situation that it was, leaving me with this mental anxiety wound gaping and bleeding and nothing to do but let it cool in the 1am air and try to come down from the high. It was like I was begging it to just rip the bandaid off, and it finally did, and took my arm with it. Reading it so late at night was a mistake (some of us aren’t lucky enough to be trapped day after day on a quarantined island and we have to get up early for work) but it was a great mindset to be in, exhausted and vulnerable, reading about exhausted vulnerable girls trying to survive- it’s going to stay with me for a while.

Wilder Girls is memorable and fun and sad- a notable highlight of my reading this year. I don’t know that it will change you, but it will take you by the hand cautiously, with a small hesitant smile, lead you behind the dark trees hidden from view, and show you the mutated, writhing, multiple-eyed corpse of a dead bobcat it just shot with a hunting rifle. And then maybe kiss you (pretty chaste because it doesn’t know if you feel the same, and neither do you really) right there as the dead thing watches you from the ground, growing fleshy roots into the dirt and dead leaves, before you’re both consumed by the plague, a flesh eating deer, or the hazmat team finally takes you away for testing. It just wants to have one sad, sweet first kiss with you over mutated dead animals, can’t you do that? Just this once? show less

“Why me?!”, I asked my wife, “Why do I always have to choose the worst books?!” - with the prettiest covers, I might add.

Because this book is a classic example why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover – which, in this case, is beautiful whereas the contents read like they’ve partly been ripped out of the script to some mediocre horror b-movie and partly been born out of the brain of a pubescent teenager. Maybe a sadistic ecology freak was on-board as well because at times the book reads like something along the lines of “nature strikes back”.

The plot is simple and the premise interesting: A female-only boarding school on a small island; “the Tox”, some kind of plague, ravaging the wildlife, the girls and their show more teachers. Hetty, Byatt and Reese, three pupils and friends, are trying to survive. Suddenly, when Byatt vanishes Hetty learns something sinister is going on on the island...



I’m not even sure where to start with my criticism because this book has almost no redeeming qualities: The writing is weird and I found myself asking “what did she smoke?!”:



“And in the other hand, Raxter. No ferry on the horizon, mainland far and farther. Water and shoreline born new every day. Everything what it wants to be. Everything mine. I’m buried there no matter where I go.”



The wise old woman expressing the above is Hetty, a teenager of 16 years... Yeah, riiight...



The pacing is all over the place, too: Slow introductive scenes into the not-so-normal school life with the Tox dominate the first 50% of the book. Then, suddenly, things escalate quickly and we find ourselves in outlandish fights with cross-breeds between human and flora, and corrupted animals.

Then again, things come to a screeching halt and we’re back inside the school. As if that wasn’t enough already, we’re witnessing school girl tragedy, the evil headmistress, the misunderstood well-meaning teacher and lots of other characterless characters.

In a rather simplistic attempt to cater to a broader audience, there are some LGBT motifs tacked on to the story. Unfortunately, they feel completely artificial and add nothing at all to the story. The entire ménage à trois between our three lacklustre “heroines” feels completely off and weird. Worst with respect to that, though: I didn’t care one bit. Byatt? Reese? I couldn’t care less whom of which makes Hetty’s heart beat faster.



This entire book feels very bizarre but not in a good way. I progressed from “bizarre”...



““Don’t,” […] cries from behind me. But I can’t listen. It’s not him anymore. I lean hard, brace my hand on his elbow as I wedge the knife deeper and deeper and start to lever it up. There’s a heart to all this. There has to be.”



… to “seriously?!”...



“He’s rotting from the inside out.”



… to “disgusting”...



“Until finally. A snap. And inside his rib cage, I see it. A beating heart, glossed in blood. Built from the earth, from the bristle of pine, and inside, there is something else, something more, something living. I don’t think twice. Just claw at it with both hands, and it comes screaming out with a wet tear.”



… within this very scene and the entire book.



Especially the above scene made me actually think that these might simply be the feverish violent fantasies of a pubescent boy, tinged with bloodthirsty revenge.

Curiously, Hetty of all people sums up my feelings for this book pretty well:



“Person after person collapsing under the weight of this place, lie after lie, and I’ve had enough of this. Enough of these confrontations, of secrets spilling out of us like blood.”





Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram show less

Feminist horror, yes please and thank you, may I have some more?

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for suicide.)

The Tox didn’t just happen to us. It happened to everything. [...]

The way it happened is that the woods got it first. That’s what I think, anyway. Even before the wilderness reached inside us, it was seeping into the earth. The trees were growing taller, new saplings springing up faster than they had any right to. And it was fine; it was nothing worth noticing, until I looked out the window and couldn’t see the Raxter I knew anymore. That morning two girls tore each other’s hair out over breakfast with an animal viciousness, and by afternoon the Tox had hit us. show more

***

“We’ve been studying them,” Paretta says, crouching down in front of me. “The irises, and the blue crabs too. All of this is something we’re calling the Raxter Phenomenon.”

A phenomenon. Not a sickness, not a disease. It burns through my heart—that’s the word I’ve been looking for—but there’s something about the way she says it. The name too familiar, too easy on her tongue.

“Did they teach you about Raxter Blues at school?” she asks. “About what makes them special?”

I nod.

You mean the lungs

“And the gills,” Paretta says. “It’s pretty amazing, right? So it can survive anywhere. And I think it’s pretty amazing, too, that you girls are part of it now.”

Part of it. The way our bodies alter and bend. The way our fingers darken just before we die, pure black spreading up to our knuckles.

***

I think I have been a problem all my life. Here I am where problems go. First Raxter and now here, and I have always been heading here, haven’t I, haven’t I. Too bright and too bored and something missing, or perhaps something too much there.

***

The several hundred tweens and teens who attend the Raxter School for Girls run the gamut. Some, like Hetty Chapin, were admitted on scholarship when her father, a Navy man, was stationed at nearby Camp Nash. Others are warehoused there by parents who didn't know how to deal with them; this would describe Hetty's bestie Byatt. And then there's Reese, the third point in this particular triumvirate (just one of many cliques at Raxter), who grew up on the island and whose father, Mr. Harker, works as a groundskeeper and general caretaker at Raxter.

Aside from the occasional tour group, he's also the only cis man to walk Raxter Island on the regular. (That we know of! Dun dun duuuun!)

Raxter was already home to several biological anomolies - the Raxter irises, which bloom all year long; and the Blues, crabs that sport both gills and lungs for all-terrain survival - so perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise when the Tox hit, altering the landscape of Raxter in ways both horrifying and wondrous. The flora took over, transforming Raxter into a forested backdrop from so many Grimm fairy tales. The nonhuman inhabitants grew to monstrous sizes. Predators became vicious and unpredictable, and even herbivores like deers sprouted canines better suited to ripping flesh from bones than leaves from trees.

And the girls.

The girls were either reclaimed or transformed by the wild, depending on your point of view; made a part of Raxter's savage, shifting ecosystem, or else metamorphosed into something new. Something better. By which I mean something better suited to its environment; something with more favorable odds of survival. Their old environment or new one, you ask? Both. Neither. All of the above.

When the Tox hit, it changed everyone, though not in the same ways. One of Hetty's eyes fused shut. Byatt grew a second spine and, eventually, her voice became a weapon capable of inflicting great violence. Reese's skin turned silver and scaly, one of her hands grew lizard claws, and her hair took on an ethereal aura. Some girls grew teeth inside of them and coughed them up at night; one started to feel a second heartbeat in her chest. Blisters, boils, bruises, sores, scars. Webbed fingers and gills. No one bothers to hide their anomalies anymore; what's the point?

Most of the adults dropped dead, save for Ms. Welch and the Headmistress. Mr. Harker started acting erratic and then disappeared into the woods. Some of the girls succumbed as well; the rest live in constant dread of the next flare-up.

Raxter Island is under quarantine; the school, already surrounded by an imposing iron fence, has become a prison/sick ward. Already isolated, internet service to Raxter was cut off pretty quickly. The regular supply drops help, but it seems that there's never enough food to go around. Camp Nash, along with the Navy and CDC, implores the girls to stay alive and wait for help to come.

But it's been a year and a half. How long can they hold on?

Spoiler alert: not much longer. When Byatt falls ill - by which I mean extremely ill, sicker than the others and in such bad shape that she cannot get around on her own - and is sent up to the super-secretive infirmary wing of the school, it sets in motion a chain of events that will bring everything to a head. Everyone at Raxter misses someone, or something. The question becomes, to what depths are they willing to sink to get it?

Wilder Girls is such a great story - true, edge-of-your-seat, white-knuckle reading. The characters are complex and compelling; the dynamics between Hetty-Byatt and Hetty-Reese and Hetty-Byatt-Reese are fascinating, and there's a really lovely f/f romance in here to boot. The atmosphere is sufficiently spooky and the adults make for great villains (or antiheroes, again depending on your POV). The writing is a thing of beauty, and the subversive feminist elements really make the story shimmer and sparkle (and assail you with painful insights). This is a memorable piece of feminist horror with a dystopian twist, and I can't wait to see what Power does next.

Honestly, the only downside (and reason for the four-star rating) is the ending, which leaves things a little open-ended for me. Then again, wrapping things up with a shiny red bow would have felt cheap and dishonest, so there's that.

I won't say more for fear of spoiling things (it's really best to go in cold I think), but the hype is real. Badass ladies (and male allies), you want to read this book.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2019/07/09/wilder-girls-by-rory-power/ show less

I received this ARC from Delacorte Press via BookishFirst in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of this book in any way. All quotes are taken from the uncorrected proof and are subject to change.

I better be getting a sequel or I will personally strangle Rory Power.

The Tox didn't just happen to us. It happened to everything.

Obligatory Summary

It's been 18 months since an insidious and horrific disease known as the Tox took over Raxter Island, and the girls trapped there are beginning to unravel. The Tox takes something from each of them, humans and animals alike—some their eyes, some their sanity—and gives them something else in return.

Hettie and her two best friends, Byatt and Reese, have managed to show more maintain a friendship throughout all this turmoil. But things are changing, and when one of them disappears, Hettie will do whatever it takes to find her.

Part psychological thriller, part psychological horror, Wilder Girls is about bodies and minds and how to break both.

There's this place in her, somewhere nobody can touch, not me or Reese or anyone. It's just hers, and I don't even know what it is, really, just that it's there, and that she takes it with her when she goes.

My Thoughts

Phenomenal!! Absolutely phenomenal!!! I've never read a book more accurately compared to another work of fiction; Wilder Girls truly is the YA Annihilation, for both the book and the movie version. It's also very similar to Lord of the Flies in all the best ways. It's atmospheric. It's spooky. It's got all the feels. It gives you burgeoning existential dread. I loved every second of it.

The writing is a tad difficult to get into at first, but once you're in, you really can't get out. It has a very stream-of-consciousness style that usually doesn't work for me with first person, but it worked amazingly well in this. Those messy, confusing scenes were some of my absolute favorites, and I can't wait to reread this just to experience them again.

I think I have been a problem all my life. Here I am where problems go. First Raxter and now here, and I have always been heading here, haven't I, haven't I. Too bright and too bored and something missing, or perhaps something too much there.

I will warn you now: this emulates Annihilation in more than just atmosphere and eco-spooks. It has one of the most open endings I've ever read for a book that isn't in a confirmed series. It's more vague than The Giver (and that did get confirmed!) I personally didn't mind it (that much; I am willing to strangle Rory Power if I never get an answer, mind you) but I can imagine it bothering a lot of people. I've generally accepted that horror usually doesn't give you any concrete answers, because explanations tend to eliminate the spook factor. I mean, just look at Lost.

As for characters, I did get a little bored with Hettie sometimes, but only because of certain things that were happening with Byatt at the same time and I really wanted to know her side of things more than Hettie's. Overall, though, I loved all the characters. I loved the LGBTQ inclusion, and how it wasn't done in a self-indulgent, ~ooh, look at me! I'm inclusive~ kind of way. It was natural and realistic and I loved it. The way Power planted little seeds of character development (and really, worldbuilding too) and then expanded on them in a reveal either shortly after or way later was honestly so masterful. I will literally rave about how well everything was set up for hours if you let me.

A wilderness in everyone, like the one I've always felt in me. Only real this time. In my body, and not just in my head.

Essentially, it all comes down to this. TL;DR this was lovely and if you like body horror and Lord of the Flies, then you'll probably love this. show less