Wilder Girls by Rory Power

Wilder Girls

By Rory Power
Published: Delacorte Press, 2019
Pages: 348
Genre: Young Adult, Horror
Amazon, Goodreads

"We don't get to choose what hurts us” 

About the book

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.

Review

Wilder Girls is the YA horror novel I didn't realize I needed in my life until now.

Power's writing is creepy and fantastic. She paints such vivid, gross scenes wrapped in an eerie atmosphere, such as:

He's rotting from the inside out. Tissue mottled with mold, the smell so sour and stinging that my eye is watering. Something scuttles up my jacket sleeve, first one then another, and another, and in the red light of a flare I make out the gleam of a hundred wingback beetles crawling out of the wound.

And:

Some days it’s fine. Others it nearly breaks me. The emptiness of the horizon, and the hunger in my body, and how will we ever survive this if we can’t survive each other?

From the very first paragraph, readers can tell the story is disturbing and sinister. Call me old fashioned, but this is how horror should be: a take all, no survivors, freaky as fuck war zone.

I feel like Wilder Girls makes a statement about sticking together and the importance of friendship. I haven't read many of the other reviews about Wilder Girls, but we as women need to stand together and watch each others' backs. In the novel, the school girls are in survival mode: they stay in their groups and watch out for one another. Without giving too much away, the main characters Hetty, Reese, and Byatt are separated from one another. Through the horrors, illness, and traumas taking place around them, the girls reflect on their relationships with each other. Throughout the story's development, the girls on the island are abandoned, left to fend for themselves, but the one thing the main characters still have is their friendship. And that's a pretty awesome thing.

Wilder Girls is easily one of my favorite books of the year and one I'd definitely recommend!

RATING (out of five puppies)