Reviews with content warning for Vomit - Chicas salvajes

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Chicas salvajes by Rory Power

145 reviews

ksbrooks98's review against another edition

challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

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

4.0

I really enjoyed Wilder Girls. Rory Power’s ability say something incredibly impactful without dragging it out. It’s a YA novel but very high level and interesting for anyone. The end is very open, but I like that it leaves what happens completely open for interpretation.

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izzyvb023's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious tense fast-paced

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

3.5

This was a relatively short read and a great one for October. It’s definitely YA, but enjoyable regardless!

Pros:
- The vibes are immaculate: Spooky Girly Sapphic Medical Body Horror
- characters were equally likeable and flawed.
- it was a great read if you watch “Yellowjackets” and are waiting for the 3rd season to come out. Similar vibes and scratched the itch

Cons:
- i wish we learned more about the Tox itself! I thought the whole

global warming aspect

that gets sprinkled in towards the end is really interesting. And the

worms

were super cool too. I personally would have loved to have more of the scientific elements fleshed out
- the romance is pretty brief. If you’re looking for a fully fleshed sapphic horror romance, i’d look elsewhere. I still enjoyed it though!

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ericadawson's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

4.0

The first half of this book was difficult for me to get through because I could not, for the life of me, pay attention. I'm so glad I stuck through it.

(the lack of attention paid to this book is my own and is not evidence of the craft of this book)

Speaking first of prose, because that's what stuck out to me the most, I loved the writing. The voice reminds me of the sparse language of Christina Henry's Girl in Red, but a little more colorful, a little more dramatic, and a little dense. It's perfect for the events in this book, for what the story is trying to say.

I love the characters, too. None of them are loveable. They're all a mess, and Hetty gets worse and worse. She makes monumental mistakes that cost lives and she runs away. She forces the guilt down and down because otherwise it'll tear her apart from the inside out. I love her stubbornness, but I also love that mere love for her best friend isn't enough to absolve her of the guilt she feels. I love that death follows her because of that love. I don't think she'll ever escape.

I like Reese too, but wish I could have seen more of Byatt. Headmistress and Welch were a little weak to me as characters, especially headmistress in the end. I also wish I could have gotten more detail about the Tox and the parasite and its history, but I guess there was always meant to be that level of vagueness with it.

This book is the first book I've ever read in YEARS that actually had me scared to read it too late at night. Something about the writing and story and the way the author sets up the scenes had me tight with fear.

Some parts of the characterization were a little vague and abstract for me, but overall the book was a good read. It works well as a standalone. Highly recommend for people who like body horror and messy teenaged girls.

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gandalfsleftshoe's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

4.0

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thebetterstory's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

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

2.75

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.

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zmeiat's review against another edition

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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.

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beeboy03's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

2.0

i think the concept of this book is really intriguing and had the potential to be great but the story was strongly lacking. the characters relationships are so confusing and i feel like we never got to see them properly interact. hetty and reese have zero chemistry and reese seems to only exist to support hetty, having no character traits of her own. byatt’s intentions are also so confusing,

why the heck did she kiss that man?! i have no idea. and them finding her initials in the tree as proof of her being alive makes no sense since we never see byatt do this. i guess we can assume she was there when taken to be tested but it’s too disconnected when not seeing it from hyatt’s perspective. another inconsistency is hetty saying she’s never seen byatt off the island, “when i see her on the mainland, will she still be my byatt?” but we’ve been told that they have gone to the mainland together before! also hetty and reese seem to care about everyone but at the same time they don’t? and they just leave them all to die? and why the HECK is the only explanation for the tox climate change? it definitely needed more explaining than just that.

overall this book was wildly inconsistent with little explanation, and the characters were not fleshed out enough.

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