“I think I’d been looking for it all my life
a storm in my body to match the one in my head.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls
Stories where people are trapped in an environment and must escape or succumb to whatever pursues them are always at the top of my list. The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, is one of my favorite films of all time and features a of group of scientists isolated in a snowy science lab and threatened by a protean enemy. Violence and madness ensue. In this post, we are going to analyze Wilder Girls by Rory power.
Summary
To begin, the book is set around the Raxter School for Girls, where the entire facility has been put on lockdown due to a mysterious disease known as the Tox. As such, they have been on lockdown for 18 months, and the girls in the school struggle to survive as they wait for a cure to arrive. However, they dare not venture into the woods around the facility as the Tox has made it too dangerous to brave. One girl, Hetty, must break the quarantine and venture into the woods to save her friend Byatt, which uncovers unsettling truths about their existence at the school.
Critical response
Reviews for Wilder Girls by Rory Power are as follows:
Kirkus Reviews: “This gritty, lush debut chronicling psychological and environmental tipping points…weaves a chilling narrative that disrupts readers’ expectations through an expertly crafted, slow-burn reveal of the deadly consequences of climate change….Part survival thriller, part post-apocalyptic romance, and part ecocritical feminist manifesto, a staggering gut punch of a book.”
Publishers Weekly: “Electric prose, compelling relationships, and visceral horror illuminate Power’s incisive debut…[and its] environmental and feminist themes are resonant, particularly the immeasurable costs of experimentation on female bodies, and the power of female solidarity and resilience amid ecological and political turmoil.”
Additionally, on Goodreads, Wilder Girls holds a 3.46 out of 5 stars based upon 83,294 ratings and 15,121 reviews.
Moreover, five-star reviews state that the book was “super weird, kind of gross,” but they “totally loved it.” Also, other reviewers stated that it was loaded with “eeriness, otherworldly dread, and baseline panic.”
At the same time, one-star reviews state that the book had “no plot” or “character development.” Similarly, other reviewers state that it is a “big no-no” when the book is compared to a classic, such as Lord of the Flies, which clearly has some parallels in children trapped in a youth society.
Trigger Warnings
Other reviewers cite the trigger and content warnings from the author’s website:
- Graphic violence and body horror. Gore.
- On the page character death, parental death, and animal death (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.
- Suicide and suicidal ideation.
- Non-consensual medical treatment.
Any one of these triggers could certainly keep somebody from wanting to engage with the text, but they might also draw others into the narrative.
Impressions
A book about a fight for survival with unknowable horror seems to be right up my alley. I enjoy that the book seems to try to step outside of the common people-trapped-in-a-spot-and-have-to-survive story. It also uses some modern realities to punch up the plot (plagues, quarantines, and the like). Upon reading the synopsis, I thought of the film Quarantine, which haunted me for years. I also thought about “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe. I think in reading initial reactions, there seems to be some overlap in Wilder Girls, too.
