Scan barcode
A review by amybibliophile
Wilder Girls by Rory Power
5.0
This seems like its going to be just as awesome as I thought it would be.
First - The cover is BEAUTIFUL and totally gives nothing away & I would totally buy this book based on that alone.
Second - I had no idea this was going to be a delightful horror! I've been itching for more horror reads for a while now so YA-Horror? Gimme gimme!
Straight away Hetty throws you into the ugliness of their situation: a plague called 'Tox' has caught hold in a girls boarding school that sits on a remote island and we get in horrific descriptions of the effects from chapter 1 with their constant fight for food when their is not enough to go round to the scales growing on Hetty's school friends skin. These first couple of chapters have done nothing but make me want this book MORE!
Above was my first thoughts when reading the first couple of chapters on BookishFirst.
Now that I have read the whole thing I feel like my emotions are all over the place as that was a WILD read!! I have so many questions and I don't know where to start. If we don't get a book 2 after that ending I may just go and cry in the corner for a very long time... The way Wilder Girls ended has left me needing to know what lies in store for them from here, and I am desperate for answers about the Tox and how it started and the process of Raxter school for girls being placed into quarantine by the CDC & Navy.
“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? “We’re gonna make it. Tell me we’re gonna make it.”
Wilder Girls follows a trio of girls and their survival at Raxter, but the book takes form from two perspectives, Hetty & Byatt, which acted to expand the mystery and as the book progressed it was plain to see Byatt had a split personality to the loving and caring one she always showed Hetty, this only increased for me when Reece said that she had seen a different side to her than the way she was with Hetty. What I did find different to other YA stories was the f/f romance, it wasn't overplayed and didn't come into being until deeper into the book, it was delicate and soft yet held promise.
“Usually, it was an accident. A lie I never set out to tell. A trick I never meant to play. I’d open my mouth, and something strange would come out, new and not mine. Like there was someone else inside.”
The Tox changes the girls bodies in the most horrific of ways, some of those being growing second spines, coughing up teeth and growing gills. Each girl once they have gone through their first flare up, comes out of it with a different deformity. The virus doesn't just effect the girls, but all of the wildlife on the island, creating dangerous blood thirsty animals that due to the lack of food will attack all other living things on sight with an inhumane hunger.
I was absorbed by Rory's writing style because it's SO atmospheric and down right captivating. She made it feel like a dystopian novel from the outset, and for most of the book I was convinced that it would turn out to be just that but I was very wrong.
As I mentioned at the start, I have a lot of questions that have been left unanswered. Maybe the author wanted it this way to leave an opening for a sequel, or maybe we are just never meant to know and can only hope for the best for the girls at Raxter. Who knows? It is as bewildering as the Tox itself!
“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.”
Disclaimer - This book is a YA horror, it is uncomfortable at times, it will raise the hair on your neck and has many graphic death scenes.
First - The cover is BEAUTIFUL and totally gives nothing away & I would totally buy this book based on that alone.
Second - I had no idea this was going to be a delightful horror! I've been itching for more horror reads for a while now so YA-Horror? Gimme gimme!
Straight away Hetty throws you into the ugliness of their situation: a plague called 'Tox' has caught hold in a girls boarding school that sits on a remote island and we get in horrific descriptions of the effects from chapter 1 with their constant fight for food when their is not enough to go round to the scales growing on Hetty's school friends skin. These first couple of chapters have done nothing but make me want this book MORE!
Above was my first thoughts when reading the first couple of chapters on BookishFirst.
Now that I have read the whole thing I feel like my emotions are all over the place as that was a WILD read!! I have so many questions and I don't know where to start. If we don't get a book 2 after that ending I may just go and cry in the corner for a very long time... The way Wilder Girls ended has left me needing to know what lies in store for them from here, and I am desperate for answers about the Tox and how it started and the process of Raxter school for girls being placed into quarantine by the CDC & Navy.
“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? “We’re gonna make it. Tell me we’re gonna make it.”
Wilder Girls follows a trio of girls and their survival at Raxter, but the book takes form from two perspectives, Hetty & Byatt, which acted to expand the mystery and as the book progressed it was plain to see Byatt had a split personality to the loving and caring one she always showed Hetty, this only increased for me when Reece said that she had seen a different side to her than the way she was with Hetty. What I did find different to other YA stories was the f/f romance, it wasn't overplayed and didn't come into being until deeper into the book, it was delicate and soft yet held promise.
“Usually, it was an accident. A lie I never set out to tell. A trick I never meant to play. I’d open my mouth, and something strange would come out, new and not mine. Like there was someone else inside.”
The Tox changes the girls bodies in the most horrific of ways, some of those being growing second spines, coughing up teeth and growing gills. Each girl once they have gone through their first flare up, comes out of it with a different deformity. The virus doesn't just effect the girls, but all of the wildlife on the island, creating dangerous blood thirsty animals that due to the lack of food will attack all other living things on sight with an inhumane hunger.
I was absorbed by Rory's writing style because it's SO atmospheric and down right captivating. She made it feel like a dystopian novel from the outset, and for most of the book I was convinced that it would turn out to be just that but I was very wrong.
As I mentioned at the start, I have a lot of questions that have been left unanswered. Maybe the author wanted it this way to leave an opening for a sequel, or maybe we are just never meant to know and can only hope for the best for the girls at Raxter. Who knows? It is as bewildering as the Tox itself!
“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.”
Disclaimer - This book is a YA horror, it is uncomfortable at times, it will raise the hair on your neck and has many graphic death scenes.