Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - Wilder Girls

I wish this lived up to its premise. "Boarding school girls go full Lord of the Flies, with bonus body horror" has tons of potential as a concept, and for the first half of the book or so while it's setting up its mysteries I was hopeful it would deliver.

Unfortunately, the book didn't seem to have any real themes to tie its plot together. The Tox seems perfectly designed to be a meaningful metaphor: it's only survivable by cis girls (or presumably AFAB folks in general, which is addressed), it only hits during or after puberty, and in at least some of its forms it causes the victims to develop bestial features, animalistic rage and merge with sentient plant life. At times the book seems to suggest it frees the girls from the confines of their social and gender roles, but most of the time it's just played straightforwardly as an uncomplicated horror-flavoured problem with no greater meaning. It works that way because it works that way.

Without particularly strong prose or ideas to fall back on, the plot meanders around and becomes just a series of things happening. Often bad things happening, often directly as the result of poor decisions made by the main trio of girls. I frequently had the urge to reach through the book and shake them.

Why deliver the obvious can of euthanasia gas to the Headmistress you know you can't trust? Why lie to a boy to get him to kiss you when you have Deadly Body Horror Plague if you're going to feel bad when he inevitably contracts it, especially if that's then going to be played for angst as though you couldn't have known?

Logic is thin on the ground, both with the girls and with the actual plot itself, and when the answers to the latter's mysteries are revealed they're both poorly explained and incredibly dull.

Parasite worms as the results of melting polar ice? Really? This would perhaps work if the book had been going hard on ecological themes, but it really doesn't.

So with all that said, do the characters and their relationships manage to carry the book? Nope. The characterization is wildly inconsistent. We're introduced to Byatt as someone caring and good at holding herself together for other people's sake, and the way the book rips that away isn't so much interesting as baffling because there was little to no foreshadowing. Reese is established as a cold, harsh determinator with a temper who wants to survive and win no matter what, but she spends most of the second half of the book being the opposite of pragmatic, while Hetty steps in to take that role. Meanwhile, a ton of emphasis is placed on Hetty's guilt and feelings of camaraderie towards the other girls,

only for her to abandon them all to die at the end without a second thought. Shortly after criticizing the Headmistress and Taylor for wanting to do the same thing. Make it make sense!!!

The weak, half-hearted ending is just the final straw. If you want a first-person book about a clever group of women in isolated circumstances dealing with mystery and excellent eco-horror, I'd recommend you bypass this entirely and go for Annihilation instead.

Content Warnings

4k_lizards's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

The premise of this book is really great but it feel like so much is missing. There's not much explanation for what's happening, which is understandable since it's coming from the viewpoint of girls who don't know what's going on around them, but it leaves a bit unsaid. The end is abrupt and a little rushed, and the romance is somehow both over-explained and still leaves you going, "wait, where did that even come from?" Very open ending, which would have been fine if you knew what was going on from the start. I think this just isn't my cup of tea.

Content Warnings

zmeiat's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

Very interesting and engaging story. It could however have fleshed out the Tox and its properties more since It felt like it was doing a lot of things at once.
Nevertheless it was a good read.

Content Warnings

ratgirl17's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Content Warnings

annoyedbabe's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

That was honestly a lot more brutal and frightening than I thought I was signing myself up for. Some of those scenes were described in such detail it really made my skin crawl (book TW: self-harm, suicide, death). I enjoyed the story a lot, but the ending left me kind of confused of their plan for their next step.

Content Warnings