About the Book
Title: Wilder Girls
Author: Rory Power
Series: none
Genre: YA Dystopian
Pages: 357
Edition Read: Paperback
Dates Read: January 22 – 26, 2023
Blurb: 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 am so conflicted with this one. There were so many things that I liked and a few things that really frustrated me.
First off, I really enjoyed the setting and the world building. I typically enjoy having stories set in a boarding school environment and having a dystopian twist on it made it even more exciting. The Tox is a disease that can mutate and is completely unpredictable and uncontrollable. It’s terrifying and almost a character in it’s own right.
Speaking of characters, I also really enjoyed the characters. I loved how Hetty was extremely loyal to her friends and willing to risk her life for them. I loved how Byatt was so supportive of Hetty and how the two of them both reached out to Reese. I also loved Reese, how much of a badass she was. One of my complaints of the book is that we didn’t really know anything about the other students. I also wish we had more of an idea of what Raxter was like before the Tox came when all the girls were “normal.”
Moving on to my main complaint of the book: the ending. Obviously I am not going to spoil the ending, but it would be hard to do that because . . . there wasn’t one. It just sort of stopped, and what’s worse is that we have no idea whether certain characters live or die. I don’t mind ambiguous endings to books, but at least most of the time, you still get some closer to the store itself. Not so with this one. I wouldn’t have been as frustrated if this was the first part of a series where I knew that we would eventually find out more information, but as far as I can see, this is a standalone novel. Nothing else is planned.
I very rarely give negative reviews, and I’m not saying that this is a bad book. Not at all. There were so many things that were wonderful about it. Mostly, it was the ending that ruined it for me. I really wish there was one.
GoodReads rating: 3 stars
Categories: Books I've Read
Life With No Plot 
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