“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 my favorite. 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.
Today’s post is about Wilder Girls by Rory power, a book that has been on my radar due to reviews and critical reception alone. We are going to outline the book and then provide critical reception before I give my impressions of the story.
Summary
The book is set around the Raxter School for Girls, where the entire facility has been put on lockdown due to a mysterious disease. The girls in the school struggle to survive as they wait for a cure to arrive, knowing that the woods around the facility are too dangerous to brave. One girl, Hetty, must venture into the woods to save her friend.
Book blurb
From 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.
Critical response
Reviews for the book 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.”
On Goodreads, Wilder Girls holds a 3.46 out of 5 stars based upon 83,294 ratings and 15,121 reviews.
Five-star reviews state that the book was “super weird, kind of gross,” but they “totally loved it.” Moreover, 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.
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 and use some modern realities to punch up the plot (plagues, quarantines, and the like). Upon reading the synopsis, I could only think of the film Quarantine, which haunted me for years. I think in reading initial reactions, that may be the same for Wilder Girls, too.
I think I plan on reading Wilder Girls after I get caught up on my current catalogue (still there since graduate school), as I find the premise really interesting as a mode of post-apocalyptic fiction.
If you have read this or are planning on reading this book, please put your thoughts and feelings in the comments! I would love to hear what you think.
