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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.
( Massive spoilers and a lot of ranting about nonsensical plotting )
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.
( Massive spoilers and a lot of ranting about nonsensical plotting )
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
