The Wilder Girls

In Wilder Girls, by Rory Power, an outbreak of a horrific Tox causes creepy mutations and makes a girl’s school on a remote island to go into quarantine.  The Raxter School went voluntarily into quarantine, but now it’s clear that no one is coming to help and there’s no cure in the works.  The worldbuilding really works, when the story opens, the lack of supplies and the rhythms of Tox flare-ups are already the background of the girls’ lives. There’s also a real sense of desolation in the quarantine, with limited food, limited heat, no medicine, and no contact with the outside world.

I was particularly touched by one line about a teacher in the quarantined school carrying her classroom key, as she assigns girls to pick up meager supplies from a drop point or supervises the grabbing of food at meals, as if someday she might go back to regular teaching, and as I enter the third month of quarantine online classes, I really feel it. I would absolutely carry my classroom key in the plague.

But besides that one moment, I didn’t really connect with any of the characters. The girls swing back and forth between feral survivalists and prep school mean girls. I normally love found family, but somehow I wasn’t much moved by their friendship and love. I wanted the three main characters to survive long enough to discover all the mysteries of the Tox!

Perhaps my lack of connection to the three main characters made the ending fall a bit flat for me. None of the worldbuilding questions is fully resolved. After all those tantalizing hints about the Raxter Blue in irises and crabs, and the vague suspicion that the navy and possibly even the girls’ parents were all in on the Tox experiment, and even the overall question about what benefit the Tox “research” could possibly have, the novel just wraps up.