Review: WILDER GIRLS by Rory Power

Wilder Girls by Rory Power
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Everyone loses something to the Tox; Hetty lost her eye, Reese's hand has changed, and Byatt just disappeared completely.

It’s been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put in quarantine. The Tox turned the students strange and savage, the teachers died off one by one. Cut off from the mainland, the girls don’t dare wander past the school’s fence where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure as the Tox takes; their bodies becoming sick and foreign, things bursting out of them, bits missing.

But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her best friend, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie in the wilderness past the fence. As she digs deeper, she learns disturbing truths about her school and what else is living on Raxter Island. And that the cure might not be a cure at all... 

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Gah, this book!!!!!

I've had it on my kindle for over a year, and I wasn't sure why I hadn't yet read it, so one day I picked it up, not expecting to be totally grabbed by it...and I didn't surface until I'd finish it. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration as I read it in sections across about a week. But I truly felt like I was never leaving this book every time I paused. I was so caught up in this world, and I felt like I was living in it. I couldn't stop thinking about it.

It's amazing. Even if I was reading about a pandemic during a real global pandemic... 

Hetty, Byatt, and Reese are at the Raxter school, an all-girls school, on an island, when the Tox breaks out and they're all in quarantine, unable to leave. The Tox is a brutal illness--and it marks its victims in different ways, if they survive it at all. Hetty lost an eye to it, Byatt's got problems with her spine, and Reese has got a scaled hand. And pretty much every character has some sort of disability from it. And I wasn't expecting the disability rep to be great, I'll be honest--but it really is. As a disabled reader, I was so delighted to see this. All the characters in this book are disabled and badass. I loved it!

And Miss Welch--can we just talk about her for a moment? Her characterisation is wonderful. I was really hating her (spoiler ahead--skip to next paragraph to avoid it!) and then there's that amazing reveal where all her actions that make us hate her suddenly make sense, and we learn who the real villain of the book is.

Talking of great reveals--the way we learn info about what the Tox is and what is really going on on Raxter island is just great.

The writing in this book is incredible. It's almost stream-of-consciousness in places, just sooooo immersive and beautifully written. It's told in dual POV between Hetty and Byatt, and even their narrative voices are so distinct, despite both being written in this immersive way.

And the romance. This is such a great LGBT book with romance between Hetty and Reese (I'll be honest, I didn't see that coming as there's a real closeness between Hetty and Byatt, but it felt so natural.) I think Reese is my fave character though. There's something fierce and prickly about her. She's not as easy to like, and I love that.

The only thing that surprised me about this book is the ending... Like, is there going to be a sequel??? Because the (and another spoiler here!) whole book is about beating the Tox, and that just...doesn't happen. It feels like we've got the set up for at least another book. This one finishes with Hetty and Reese escaping the island, but it doesn't feel like the story's over yet. I really hope there's a sequel.

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