Wilder Girls
Author: Rory Power
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Publication date: July 2019
The girls on Raxter Island are no longer students, but survivors. Sent to a boarding school for girls ages 11-18, their bodies have become infected with a mysterious plague that they call the Tox. It has not only poisoned them, but every living thing on the island. Each flare up is worse. The number of girls left alive is dwindling, and the Navy won’t lift the quarantine order they set on the island when the Tox began. Hetty, Byatt, and Reese are a part of the handful of girls who are left. All they know is their rotations on Gun Shift atop the roof, the meager supplies the Boat Shift girls bring back, and that unless they are those Boat Shift girls, they must never venture outside the school’s gates. That is, if they want to stay alive. Then Byatt, Hetty’s best friend, goes missing. Hetty and Reese will do anything to find her - sneak past the gates, defy Headmistress, and face the woods that the Tox has poisoned almost beyond recognition. But braving the woods brings even more hardship than the ever worsening challenge of surviving. Hetty and Reese begin to uncover the island’s darkest secrets, and begin to discover the pain that each of them has been hiding from the other.
Wilder Girls is a chilling read, but it is also a heartwarming story of friendship persevering against all odds. The author’s use of sentence fragments sharpens the anxiety and eeriness saturating this story. More than just suspense, there is often a feeling of dark emotional vertigo. This is a great book for any middle grade or young adult reader who savors transfixing horror with strong female characters set in a recognizably modern world.
D. K. Nuray, age 13
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