Friday Book Reviews: Wilder Girls by Rory Power

For someone preparing to enter a boarding school, Wilder Girls may have been the perfect summer read. Rory Power’s sci-fi/horror novel is set in an all-girls (you guessed it) boarding school, though that is where the similarities end. Instead of being right across Main Street, Wilder Girls’s school is stranded on a wooded island, where an illness called the Tox has forced everyone to quarantine far beyond their expected stay. Every day, more and more peoples’ bodies and minds are warped by the Tox, including those of the main trio: Hetty, Byatt, and Reese. This tight-knit, secluded setting for the story worked greatly to Power’s advantage: the characters constantly being close to each other forced them to depend on their relationships while adding a sense of claustrophobia and panic to the mood.

For the most part, the characters are portrayed realistically to their age, meaning they’re flawed in ways that many sci-fi characters fail at. Struggling to balance relationships with survival, the fear-driven sixteen-year-olds often approach one another with selfishness and a lack of communication. However, Power attempts to set the protagonist, Hetty, apart. Throughout the story, Hetty is motivated by a need to be her friends’ savior. I think we can all admit that this is a noble mindset, but it is something I found myself wishing Powers would explain. She expected labels like “friendship” and “love” to speak for themselves. As the book continues, Hetty’s possessiveness, recklessness, and self-sacrifice becomes painfully repetitive. It is much harder to sympathize with her once you realize that she will continue to put herself in danger without heeding consequences. 

Although Powers crafted Hetty as a risk-taking character, she herself took few risks as an author while constructing the plot. Sure, she toyed with the heavy concepts of violence and desperation that dominated the book’s advertisements. However, they became little more than prolonged descriptions of injuries that, albeit well written, carried no weight. From the middle onwards, reading Wilder Girls was much like watching a high-jumper take a running start, just to hit the sand palms-first: sure, the twists were not what I expected, but they were ultimately meaningless.

No matter how it may sound, reading Wilder Girls was worth it in many ways. As a reader, I found myself wondering how I would deal with the circumstances Power presented, even if it was not in the way Hetty did. As a horror fan, Power’s vivid writing was a guilty pleasure. So, for all you sci-fi fans, I suggest you give the novel a try. I promise you that if nothing else, you will find a friend in one of the characters living on that island.