A review by megsbookishtwins
Wilder Girls by Rory Power

4.0

disclaimer: I received this free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

trigger warnings: violence, gore, body horror, self harm, suicide

It has been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was placed into quarantine. Eighteen months since they’ve had a proper meal. Eighteen months since the first girl came down with The Tox. The Tox, a strange and parasitic disease that changes their bodies in unusual and sometimes deadly ways – their bodies become toxic, things begin to grow from them, or they lose bits of themselves. It mutates them. It isn’t just the people that it affects as The Tox has made the island, the woods and the wildlife dangerous and wild. Inside the school fence, they wait for a cure.

“I think I’d been looking for it all my life-a storm in my body to match the one in my head.”

Wilder Girls has been on my tbr list for so long and when the opportunity came up to review on NetGalley I was so happy. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Wilder Girls with people calling it a feminist horror and modern-day Lord of the Flies. It was a… strange read but it was my kind of strange. It’s feral, it’s brutal, it’s atmospheric, and it’s queer.

I wasn’t a big fan of how it ended because it seems as though nothing was answered and nothing was resolved BUT I also feel like it wasn’t necessarily a book about The Tox, a horrible and wild disease, but a book about these girls – Hetty, Byatt, and Reese – and about their relationship and their survival. Sometimes, I think the unknown made it a more eerie read.

One of my favourite parts of Wilder Girls was the subtle horror. It isn’t a type of horror that will make you jump, but it is creepy and it is eerie and it makes your skin crawl. It’s bloody and it’s gory but I think the scariest things about Wilder Girls was the isolation and how it affected them and what it drove them to do.

“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?

The characters were a highlight of Wilder Girls. Brutal, vicious, unapologetic, determined, angry, wild, and just powerful. I loved Byatt and Hetty’s friendship and I loved Hetty and Reese’s romance.

Wilder Girls was a brutal and feral book that left me with a lot of unanswered questions but it was a book that I really enjoyed. Rory Power is a gifted writer and I look forward to her next novel, Burn Our Bodies Down.