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Much like Annihilation if the Shimmer was over a girls’ boarding school on an island and there was 100% more squicky body horror and YA dystopia tropes.
The Tox is a disease which strikes an island entirely inhabited by a girls’ boarding school and the father of one of the girls, killing many and horrifically transforming the rest. Animals and plants are also affected. To make it worse, it doesn’t just transform you and then stop, but keeps coming back in flares that do different things, most likely until it kills you. Unsurprisingly, it is promptly placed under quarantine.
The Tox symptoms are GROSS and often involve vomiting horrifying things, which is a particular squick of mine. I would not have gotten past page two if I hadn’t gotten immediately sucked in by the striking narrative voice and the way the girls deal with their situation; as it was, I had to skim a lot of extreme grossness.
The book picks up a year and a half after the quarantine. There are two adults left alive, the Headmistress and Miss Welch, and about half the girls. They subsist on the edge of starvation on insufficient supplies dropped off by the Navy, but rather than turn on each other a la Lord of the Flies, they’ve responded by forming a tight community, plus extremely close relationships with each other in couples or smaller groups, some platonic, some romantic, some where it’s hard to make that distinction. A lot of aspects of the community and smaller groups are messy and violent, but they carry on and care for each other too.
Hetty, the narrator, lost one eye to the Tox but is still an excellent shot. She has an extremely close relationship with Byatt, her best friend, who has a second spine protruding through her back. The third girl in their group is Reese, who has bioluminescent hair and a silver lizard’s hand; Reese is ferocious and prickly and secretive, and it’s not immediately clear what binds all three of them together.
There is a significant F/F relationship which I’ll explain beneath a spoiler cut, but boundary-blurring, both physical and emotional, is a big part of the story so the exact nature of relationships is hard to pin down.
Despite forever teetering on the edge of my tolerance for body horror and vomit, I found the first half of this book extremely compelling. From the title I expected it to be about girls discovering their wild sides, and there are aspects of that, but I was more struck by the way in which it’s about living with chronic/terminal illness. The relationships and emotions are vivid and desperate, with a surprising amount of love and compassion given that this genre is normally more “when things go to hell everyone immediately resorts to cannibalism.” The doomed community caring for itself and its members as best it can is by far the best part of the book, in my opinion.
The second half of the book also has some striking images but gets much more conventional, to its detriment: 50% Annihilation, 50% nonsensical YA dystopia tropes. It also had one of the most frustrating endings I’ve ever read. This is partly because it stops more-or-less randomly rather than ends, and no sequel appears to be planned. This is also because the climax leading up to the point where the book stops is so utterly WTF.
It turns out that Hetty and Reese have been crushing on each other for ages, both thinking the other wasn’t into them; this is the world’s biggest cliché but it really works here, partly because of the context but partly because Hetty has an extremely intense but platonic, or maybe romantic but non-sexual, love for and dependency on Byatt, so it’s all very intense and complicated.
Needless to say, it turns out that people are secretly experimenting on the girls, in a manner which makes less sense the more details we learn about it.
It turns out that plenty of food gets dropped off, but Miss Welch throws most of it out because she thinks the Navy has tampered with it because some packages come opened. She throws out all fresh food and opened packages, and only lets the small amount of sealed packages go back to the school, which is barely enough food to survive on.
I had SO MANY problems with this.
1. How incompetent are the experimenters that they can’t re-seal a package? Why not dose all the food?
2. How can they not know this is going on when the girls who get taken to the lab are all malnourished and verging on starvation? Even if Miss Welch is just nuts and the food is fine, this has got to be interfering with their study and they should do something about it.
3. Why is Miss Welch cooperating with girls being spirited to the lab for experiments which they literally never survive, but not for their food getting dosed?
4. The lab really does seem to be looking for a cure, so why withhold it?
5. If Miss Welch is so concerned about the girls’ health, why is she starving them? She throws out fresh carrots! Why not peel the carrots? Any people who are too stupid to re-seal packages are definitely just painting stuff on the vegetables, not injecting them.
6. How is she determining what fresh food has been tampered with? We see her throw out all of it on one trip, but in the opening, a fresh orange comes back.
Admittedly much of this can be explained with “Miss Welch has lost her mind and is paranoid and irrational,” but the book seems to come down on the side of “Miss Welch is correct about the food being tampered with,” though, like everything else, this is not clear.
Byatt is taken to the experimental site after she gains an actual power from the Tox. I thought for a while that this was the result the lab was hoping for and they intended to use Tox-powered people as weapons, but there was no indication of that and I think her power was just there for cool value. Her narrative is written in such a poetic and overblown manner that I had no idea what to make of her. It doesn’t help that she doesn’t punctuate. At first I thought this was to represent that she’s sick and drugged, but it’s basically the same regardless of her physical condition.
We do learn that she’s a compulsive liar, but not what, if anything, she’s been lying about recently. Reese seems aware of this and that Hetty is projecting on Byatt, but it’s unclear whether Byatt is just more troubled than Hetty realizes or whether she’s been using Hetty or whether she’s a sociopath or what. (None of this is ever clarified.)
Hetty is determined to rescue Byatt and drags Reese along on a plan to do so. This has a number of repercussions, many of them implausible and/or annoying.
We learn that Reese always knew how to get off the island and never told anyone because she was hoping to rescue her father, who’s still on it. (As a plant-zombie, it turns out. So that went well.) This is really WTF as everyone is literally dying and it’s never even mentioned that even if she wanted to stay, others would probably like to leave. If she was worried about breaking quarantine, okay, but that’s not mentioned either.
Byatt infects a young soldier at the lab by persuading him to take off his mask and kissing him. It’s totally unclear whether she knew it would kill him and didn’t care, was deliberately infecting him, or thought it would be fine.
As a result of this and Reese and Hetty’s breakout, the Navy decides it’s too dangerous to keep their experiment running and send the teachers a canister of poison gas to mercy-kill everyone; after this they will bomb the island into oblivion. If they were that worried about infection, maybe they should have had quarantine procedures that wouldn’t leave their infected subject who has already gone ballistic and attacked them totally unsupervised with a teenage boy with minimal protective equipment. Just a thought.
A sore-ridden giant mutant bear with a half-skull-head gets into the school grounds and rampages. Its description is so similar to the bear in the Annihilation movie (it’s not in the book) that I looked up its release date and the book’s release date. They’re a year and a half apart, which isn’t quite close enough to make it definitely a coincidence. Who knows but it really jumped out at me given the similarities of the premise.
While girls are dying left and right from bear and poison gas, there are still a bunch left alive. Without ever telling the other girls there’s a way off the island and if they don’t escape they’ll be bombed to death that night, or ever discussing or thinking about telling them (or thinking about not telling them! It’s just not mentioned at all ever), Hetty and Reese take off in Reese’s boat to rescue Byatt and escape with her. So much for community.
I don’t understand this at all. If they’re entwined with only each other and otherwise sociopaths, that should be made clear. If the boat isn’t big enough to fit more girls and there’s no time to ferry them, they should say so. Instead it’s literally never mentioned that they’re leaving everyone to die when there’s no clear reason why they couldn’t rescue them. This especially makes no sense as both of them have previously endangered themselves to rescue other girls. In fact they were doing so just hours before they leave them all to die.
Meanwhile, Byatt has discovered that the Tox is a six-inch worm living inside your body. How has no one in a government lab devoted to studying the Tox ever noticed this before?
Byatt cuts hers out, then apparently loses her personality and becomes a zombie. An unresponsive human zombie, not a rotting plant hybrid zombie. So maybe the lab did know, and didn’t just remove the Tox worm because they were doing other things to try to preserve people’s brains as well as their lives? But in that case they should have some catatonic de-Toxed girls.
Anyway, there is never any indication whatsoever that the lab knew there was a worm. This makes no sense as they have been doing elaborate experiments and autopsies on the girls, and it’s a BIG FUCKING WORM that Byatt literally saw wriggling under her skin!
(It’s definitely not a hallucination. Hetty saw it too in one of the other girls, but neither of them realized what it was. And it’s definitely the case that removing it saved Byatt’s life, because she was terminal before she cut it out, and then she miraculously lived.)
Annihilation also had some logic issues but I loved it. It helped that it didn’t have this kind of fractal WTF, just things that weren’t addressed or explained. In this sort of story, generally the less you explain the better. I would have liked Wilder Girls a lot better if it had explained nothing. Also if it had dropped the whole lab/conspiracy plot, because everything related to it was gibberish.
Reese, Hetty, and catatonic Byatt end up on the boat, with no clue whether Byatt will recover or where they can go or if the Navy really is going to blow up the island or whether the entire world is infected or why they think the Navy jets flying to the island to bomb it won't notice a boat heading from the island to the mainland. Then the book stops.
Author has lots of talent but this was an extremely frustrating book. For me. I’ve seen a bunch of unqualified raves about it, as well as raves qualified due to the non-ending.
Wilder Girls
The Tox is a disease which strikes an island entirely inhabited by a girls’ boarding school and the father of one of the girls, killing many and horrifically transforming the rest. Animals and plants are also affected. To make it worse, it doesn’t just transform you and then stop, but keeps coming back in flares that do different things, most likely until it kills you. Unsurprisingly, it is promptly placed under quarantine.
The Tox symptoms are GROSS and often involve vomiting horrifying things, which is a particular squick of mine. I would not have gotten past page two if I hadn’t gotten immediately sucked in by the striking narrative voice and the way the girls deal with their situation; as it was, I had to skim a lot of extreme grossness.
The book picks up a year and a half after the quarantine. There are two adults left alive, the Headmistress and Miss Welch, and about half the girls. They subsist on the edge of starvation on insufficient supplies dropped off by the Navy, but rather than turn on each other a la Lord of the Flies, they’ve responded by forming a tight community, plus extremely close relationships with each other in couples or smaller groups, some platonic, some romantic, some where it’s hard to make that distinction. A lot of aspects of the community and smaller groups are messy and violent, but they carry on and care for each other too.
Hetty, the narrator, lost one eye to the Tox but is still an excellent shot. She has an extremely close relationship with Byatt, her best friend, who has a second spine protruding through her back. The third girl in their group is Reese, who has bioluminescent hair and a silver lizard’s hand; Reese is ferocious and prickly and secretive, and it’s not immediately clear what binds all three of them together.
There is a significant F/F relationship which I’ll explain beneath a spoiler cut, but boundary-blurring, both physical and emotional, is a big part of the story so the exact nature of relationships is hard to pin down.
Despite forever teetering on the edge of my tolerance for body horror and vomit, I found the first half of this book extremely compelling. From the title I expected it to be about girls discovering their wild sides, and there are aspects of that, but I was more struck by the way in which it’s about living with chronic/terminal illness. The relationships and emotions are vivid and desperate, with a surprising amount of love and compassion given that this genre is normally more “when things go to hell everyone immediately resorts to cannibalism.” The doomed community caring for itself and its members as best it can is by far the best part of the book, in my opinion.
The second half of the book also has some striking images but gets much more conventional, to its detriment: 50% Annihilation, 50% nonsensical YA dystopia tropes. It also had one of the most frustrating endings I’ve ever read. This is partly because it stops more-or-less randomly rather than ends, and no sequel appears to be planned. This is also because the climax leading up to the point where the book stops is so utterly WTF.
It turns out that Hetty and Reese have been crushing on each other for ages, both thinking the other wasn’t into them; this is the world’s biggest cliché but it really works here, partly because of the context but partly because Hetty has an extremely intense but platonic, or maybe romantic but non-sexual, love for and dependency on Byatt, so it’s all very intense and complicated.
Needless to say, it turns out that people are secretly experimenting on the girls, in a manner which makes less sense the more details we learn about it.
It turns out that plenty of food gets dropped off, but Miss Welch throws most of it out because she thinks the Navy has tampered with it because some packages come opened. She throws out all fresh food and opened packages, and only lets the small amount of sealed packages go back to the school, which is barely enough food to survive on.
I had SO MANY problems with this.
1. How incompetent are the experimenters that they can’t re-seal a package? Why not dose all the food?
2. How can they not know this is going on when the girls who get taken to the lab are all malnourished and verging on starvation? Even if Miss Welch is just nuts and the food is fine, this has got to be interfering with their study and they should do something about it.
3. Why is Miss Welch cooperating with girls being spirited to the lab for experiments which they literally never survive, but not for their food getting dosed?
4. The lab really does seem to be looking for a cure, so why withhold it?
5. If Miss Welch is so concerned about the girls’ health, why is she starving them? She throws out fresh carrots! Why not peel the carrots? Any people who are too stupid to re-seal packages are definitely just painting stuff on the vegetables, not injecting them.
6. How is she determining what fresh food has been tampered with? We see her throw out all of it on one trip, but in the opening, a fresh orange comes back.
Admittedly much of this can be explained with “Miss Welch has lost her mind and is paranoid and irrational,” but the book seems to come down on the side of “Miss Welch is correct about the food being tampered with,” though, like everything else, this is not clear.
Byatt is taken to the experimental site after she gains an actual power from the Tox. I thought for a while that this was the result the lab was hoping for and they intended to use Tox-powered people as weapons, but there was no indication of that and I think her power was just there for cool value. Her narrative is written in such a poetic and overblown manner that I had no idea what to make of her. It doesn’t help that she doesn’t punctuate. At first I thought this was to represent that she’s sick and drugged, but it’s basically the same regardless of her physical condition.
We do learn that she’s a compulsive liar, but not what, if anything, she’s been lying about recently. Reese seems aware of this and that Hetty is projecting on Byatt, but it’s unclear whether Byatt is just more troubled than Hetty realizes or whether she’s been using Hetty or whether she’s a sociopath or what. (None of this is ever clarified.)
Hetty is determined to rescue Byatt and drags Reese along on a plan to do so. This has a number of repercussions, many of them implausible and/or annoying.
We learn that Reese always knew how to get off the island and never told anyone because she was hoping to rescue her father, who’s still on it. (As a plant-zombie, it turns out. So that went well.) This is really WTF as everyone is literally dying and it’s never even mentioned that even if she wanted to stay, others would probably like to leave. If she was worried about breaking quarantine, okay, but that’s not mentioned either.
Byatt infects a young soldier at the lab by persuading him to take off his mask and kissing him. It’s totally unclear whether she knew it would kill him and didn’t care, was deliberately infecting him, or thought it would be fine.
As a result of this and Reese and Hetty’s breakout, the Navy decides it’s too dangerous to keep their experiment running and send the teachers a canister of poison gas to mercy-kill everyone; after this they will bomb the island into oblivion. If they were that worried about infection, maybe they should have had quarantine procedures that wouldn’t leave their infected subject who has already gone ballistic and attacked them totally unsupervised with a teenage boy with minimal protective equipment. Just a thought.
A sore-ridden giant mutant bear with a half-skull-head gets into the school grounds and rampages. Its description is so similar to the bear in the Annihilation movie (it’s not in the book) that I looked up its release date and the book’s release date. They’re a year and a half apart, which isn’t quite close enough to make it definitely a coincidence. Who knows but it really jumped out at me given the similarities of the premise.
While girls are dying left and right from bear and poison gas, there are still a bunch left alive. Without ever telling the other girls there’s a way off the island and if they don’t escape they’ll be bombed to death that night, or ever discussing or thinking about telling them (or thinking about not telling them! It’s just not mentioned at all ever), Hetty and Reese take off in Reese’s boat to rescue Byatt and escape with her. So much for community.
I don’t understand this at all. If they’re entwined with only each other and otherwise sociopaths, that should be made clear. If the boat isn’t big enough to fit more girls and there’s no time to ferry them, they should say so. Instead it’s literally never mentioned that they’re leaving everyone to die when there’s no clear reason why they couldn’t rescue them. This especially makes no sense as both of them have previously endangered themselves to rescue other girls. In fact they were doing so just hours before they leave them all to die.
Meanwhile, Byatt has discovered that the Tox is a six-inch worm living inside your body. How has no one in a government lab devoted to studying the Tox ever noticed this before?
Byatt cuts hers out, then apparently loses her personality and becomes a zombie. An unresponsive human zombie, not a rotting plant hybrid zombie. So maybe the lab did know, and didn’t just remove the Tox worm because they were doing other things to try to preserve people’s brains as well as their lives? But in that case they should have some catatonic de-Toxed girls.
Anyway, there is never any indication whatsoever that the lab knew there was a worm. This makes no sense as they have been doing elaborate experiments and autopsies on the girls, and it’s a BIG FUCKING WORM that Byatt literally saw wriggling under her skin!
(It’s definitely not a hallucination. Hetty saw it too in one of the other girls, but neither of them realized what it was. And it’s definitely the case that removing it saved Byatt’s life, because she was terminal before she cut it out, and then she miraculously lived.)
Annihilation also had some logic issues but I loved it. It helped that it didn’t have this kind of fractal WTF, just things that weren’t addressed or explained. In this sort of story, generally the less you explain the better. I would have liked Wilder Girls a lot better if it had explained nothing. Also if it had dropped the whole lab/conspiracy plot, because everything related to it was gibberish.
Reese, Hetty, and catatonic Byatt end up on the boat, with no clue whether Byatt will recover or where they can go or if the Navy really is going to blow up the island or whether the entire world is infected or why they think the Navy jets flying to the island to bomb it won't notice a boat heading from the island to the mainland. Then the book stops.
Author has lots of talent but this was an extremely frustrating book. For me. I’ve seen a bunch of unqualified raves about it, as well as raves qualified due to the non-ending.
Wilder Girls
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