WILDER GIRLS
by Rory Power
Synopsis:
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her.
It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything.
But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. And when she does, Hetty learns that there's more to their story, to their life at Raxter, than she could have ever thought true.
Review:
I went into this novel not quite knowing what to expect, as I had heard mixed things from a bunch of people whose opinions I trust and whose taste I know often allign with my own. Because of this it took me a good while to finally get to the book as I so desperately wanted to love it but wasn't quite sure whether I would; that was until my friend Ross and I decided to do an impromptu buddy read of it. As they say, the rest was history.
And so we've embarked on a wild adventure of many deaths and body horror, of ruthless girls and survival, of stubborn hope and fatalism.
I thought the start of the book was a bit slow and it took me a little bit to get into it, but once I was in, I was in. It truly feels as though Power takes her time fleshing out the world she has created for her characters in order to give the reader the ability to understand why and how they have succumbed to this new normal that their lives have become, an order so far from the reality readers will have known, but one that has been proven to be more than plausible in the light of recent events.
There's something about the writing style that suited the story so well - the short and snappy sentences were great at enhancing the snappy quick pace of the novel and making it easy to keep on reading without being able to put the book down. The dual perspective came as a surprise to me, as did the fact that the protagonists had such unique internal voices, as not all authors manage to nail this feat. Not only are Hetty and Byatt's narrative voices different and original, but the duality allows for an interesting contrast of the different facets of personality one might see through the eyes of a loved one and one's deepest self that's visible to none but themselves. The choice to not add a third perspective in spite of Reese's role being as big as the others' two was also interesting; if the girl refuses to reveal herself to the characters she's formed the deepest bonds with, the author refuses to expose her to the readers either.
While I feel like the reader never quite gets to an absolute understanding of the characters, you go get to see just enough of them to get the reasoning behind their reactions to the situations they are put in. I adored the core relations that the book is built around, both the tender and tentative romance and the passionate all-encompassing friendship. It was fascinating to see how such connections may develop in the world where one is forced to focus so much on their own survival and disregard the wellbeing of others. It's also fascinating to see how the protagonists' approach to this is presented in comparison to similar reasoning for peripheral characters within the story.
I feel like saying I adored the world the author created feels a bit strange - because of obvious reasons - but I most definitely was equally fascinated and unsettled by it. While this mightn't neccesarily be classified as an atmospheric book, the setting plays a significant part in the story; the characters aren't only people in their own right, but they are presented as extentions of the island, the course of their lives altered by the world around them in ways that they might never begin to understand. Their understanding of the world around them is also rooted in their relationship with space, quarantine having become synonymous with complacency in a way, any broadening of their horisons becoming a form of subversion.
I ADORED the fake science element of the book and it did offer many elements reminiscent of some past faves, from Anaconda to Annihilation, while also standing as its own unique thing. There were a few scientific details that didn't quite seem plausible to me (suspension of disbelief? I don't know her), but the overall product was satisfying regardless, although I'd love to be able to pick at the author's brain a bit to understand some more of the thought process behind this. Power takes these real world referents and builts a whimsical, surrealist story around them, which I have to commend even if I mightn't be buying it to the very end.
There were a few other plot holes that I noticed and whose existence did frustrate me a tad, but none of them strike me as significant enough to severely alter one's enjoyment of the book overall.
I know the ending is the thing most would have heard of when discussing this book, so I'll say it loud and clear that I didn't actually mind the open ending. I feel as though there aren't exactly many happy or particularly satisfying endings for these characters that would not have felt disingenuous to or disjointed from the rest of the story, if I'm quite frank.
That being said, choosing to end the story the way she did, Power offers the reader one last gift after succumbing them to many pages of anxiety and angst: the option to choose hope. The ambiguous ending doesn't suggest a clear path that the events are likely to go once you've left the characters, but it allows the reader to choose their own version of what they want to believe. You might choose to reluctantly hang on to the idea of hope as the characters themselves have for so long, the unlikely yet enticing idea that things may just work out, improbable as that seems. Or the reader might choose to embrace a more reasonable yet infinitely more miserable ending in which the characters are unlikely to succeed an they will have merely met the fate on would have predicted for them at earlier stages in the story.
In a sense, Power offers her reader the same agency she does her own characters and that's an interesting thing to aim for, especially in a debut. Overall, this was a fast paced read full of twists and turns, with the right amount of introspection and description thrown in to balance out the action. I'd be really interested in rereading the book one day to see how it'd hold up and how knowing the outcome would affect the initial reading experience, and I also look forward to anything else the author writes in the future.
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