Book Review: Wilder Girls by Rory Power

Wilder Girls
by Rory Power [YA Power]

Rory Power’s first novel, Wilder Girls, arrived with a great deal of pre-publication hype from the teen fiction world. For me, it lived up to the hype and I was looking for excuses for more reading time!

Wilder Girls is set on a small island off the Northeast coast of the United States, almost two years into a quarantine. Students and the two remaining faculty members of the Raxter School for Girls are infected with something that’s changing their bodies in strange ways, when it isn’t killing them in periodic flare-ups. The forest outside of school grounds has grown dense. The animals have grown fierce. Thankfully, the Navy has promised a cure and drops supplies on a dock on the other side of the island.

Hetty, Byatt, and Reese are the main trio of girls this story follows. They’re roommates who are helping each other cope with the long wait for a cure, even if their relationships are strained at times. When one of them is selected for the only crew of girls allowed to leave school grounds to pick up supplies, they discover secrets more dangerous than the infection.

This queer, feminist eco-thriller is recommended especially for fans of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (beginning with Annihilation) and his standalone novel Borne.

[ official Wilder Girls page on the official Rory Power web site ]

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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