Wilder Girls
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
"The perfect kind of story for our current era."—Hypable
Featured in Vulture’s "11 Books to Read If You Already Miss Yellowjackets"!
From the author of Burn Our Bodies Down, a feminist Lord of the Flies about three best friends living in quarantine at their island boarding school, and the lengths they go to uncover the truth of their confinement when one disappears. This fresh debut is a mind-bending novel unlike anything you've read before.
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.
And don't miss Rory Power's second novel, Burn Our Bodies Down!
Praise for Wilder Girls:
4 STARRED REVIEWS!
"Take Annihilation, add a dash of Contagion, set it at an all-girls' academy, and you'll arrive at Rory Power's occasionally shocking and always gripping Wilder Girls."--Refinery29
"This thrilling saga...is sure to be one of the season's most talked-about books, in any genre."--EW
"Fresh and horrible and beautiful....readers will be consumed and altered by Wilder Girls."--NPR
"The perfect kind of story for our current era."—Hypable
Featured in Vulture’s "11 Books to Read If You Already Miss Yellowjackets"!
From the author of Burn Our Bodies Down, a feminist Lord of the Flies about three best friends living in quarantine at their island boarding school, and the lengths they go to uncover the truth of their confinement when one disappears. This fresh debut is a mind-bending novel unlike anything you've read before.
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.
And don't miss Rory Power's second novel, Burn Our Bodies Down!
Praise for Wilder Girls:
4 STARRED REVIEWS!
"Take Annihilation, add a dash of Contagion, set it at an all-girls' academy, and you'll arrive at Rory Power's occasionally shocking and always gripping Wilder Girls."--Refinery29
"This thrilling saga...is sure to be one of the season's most talked-about books, in any genre."--EW
"Fresh and horrible and beautiful....readers will be consumed and altered by Wilder Girls."--NPR
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Community Reviews
"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."
Raw. Gory. Suspenseful. The Raxter School for Girls has been under quarantine for almost a year and a half due to a strange viral outbreak the girls refer to as the "Tox." Under the direction of the headmistress and Ms. Welch, the only two teachers left alive, the girls of Raxter struggle to stay alive. All communication from civilization has been severed - no phones, Internet, nothing. The only contact from the outside world is the periodic ration deliveries from the Navy, and then the Boat Shift risks their lives to venture outside the school walls to retrieve the supplies.
"Reese and Byatt, they're mine and I'm theirs. It's them I pray for when I pass the bulletin board and brush two fingers against the note from the Navy, still pinned there with edges fraying. A talisman, a reminder of the promise they made. The cure is coming, as long as we stay alive."
Hetty, Byatt, and Reese look out for each other. So when Byatt has a "flare up," she gets carted off to the infirmary, but ends up missing. Hetty and Reese, determined to find Byatt, stumble upon a much deeper, darker secret.
This is one of those books that is action driven and hard to put down. I read it so quickly trying to figure out what was going on that I feel as if I missed something. The story is not straightforward - you get the history of the Tox and the island in bits and pieces - which is great for driving the plot. However, I would have liked more character development to feel more connected to Hetty, Reese, and Byatt - there are too many facts that seem to drop from nowhere making the story feel a bit disjointed. But, maybe that's the author's intent.
Raw. Gory. Suspenseful. The Raxter School for Girls has been under quarantine for almost a year and a half due to a strange viral outbreak the girls refer to as the "Tox." Under the direction of the headmistress and Ms. Welch, the only two teachers left alive, the girls of Raxter struggle to stay alive. All communication from civilization has been severed - no phones, Internet, nothing. The only contact from the outside world is the periodic ration deliveries from the Navy, and then the Boat Shift risks their lives to venture outside the school walls to retrieve the supplies.
"Reese and Byatt, they're mine and I'm theirs. It's them I pray for when I pass the bulletin board and brush two fingers against the note from the Navy, still pinned there with edges fraying. A talisman, a reminder of the promise they made. The cure is coming, as long as we stay alive."
Hetty, Byatt, and Reese look out for each other. So when Byatt has a "flare up," she gets carted off to the infirmary, but ends up missing. Hetty and Reese, determined to find Byatt, stumble upon a much deeper, darker secret.
This is one of those books that is action driven and hard to put down. I read it so quickly trying to figure out what was going on that I feel as if I missed something. The story is not straightforward - you get the history of the Tox and the island in bits and pieces - which is great for driving the plot. However, I would have liked more character development to feel more connected to Hetty, Reese, and Byatt - there are too many facts that seem to drop from nowhere making the story feel a bit disjointed. But, maybe that's the author's intent.
Reading the blurb I thought I would be blown away with this book, sadly I was left feeling a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong it was a good read and was written well but the ending was deflating, it felt unfinished. I would still give it a 3.5 star rating though because it did have many good bits and it was just the ending that let me down.
Overall the book started out ok but it was just so slow and not really something I was in the mood to read I guess because I DNFd it at about 100 pages. I might pick it back up some day but right not it just isn't something I like but I can see why is appeals to others.
It was overall a good book, but I feel like concepts and themes weren’t totally developed. So many characters were left without meaningful roles, so many “important” moments weren’t totally resolved. I feel like the romance was also a bummer, there was no Ahh! moment for me that made me believe this love could be realistic, it was watered down and ambiguous. I liked the overall plot, but for me, there were just too many things that didn’t seem finished, left me unsatisfied, or just didn’t come full circle. In my opinion, not worth all the intense hype. ALSO, this is not a horror book, I’m not sure why I’m reading so many reviews that say “I couldn’t turn my lights off after reading this” or “Made shivers run up and down my spine”.
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