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Hetty and her friends live at the Raxter School for Girls, on an island just off the coast of Maine. They have been scrambling to survive since a strange infection they call the Tox took hold of them and the teachers a year and a half before. It killed off most of the adults, but one young teacher and the headmistress remain, affected by bleeding sores and tremors. The Tox has taken over not just the bodies of the humans but seemingly all life on Raxter Island: Animals are larger and deadlier, eager to attack; trees and plants have grown rapidly. The girls experience varied symptoms: Hetty’s main problem is one eye has gone blind and fused shut; her friend Reese’s hand is scaly. Her bunkmate and best friend Byatt has a sore throat and an extra ridge of bone down her back.
The girls regularly get shipments dropped to them from the mainland, containing food and other supplies, but the food given them isn’t enough for more than bare-bones rations. The girls cycle through flare-ups that they sometimes survive — and sometimes don’t.
The Raxter girls have assignments, such as taking shifts with guns on the roof of the school, and a few go outside the fence, which keeps the school’s inhabitants safe from the animals on the island and keeps them under quarantine from everywhere and everyone else, to the dock to pick up shipments. When a spot opens up on this “Boat Shift,” Hetty is given the position, and it changes her viewpoint. After a trip out to the dock, she isn’t so sure if what she and the other girls are being told about what they’re going through is the whole truth. And her subsequent choices may drastically affect their lives.
Wilder Girls has a bit of a Lord of the Flies feel to it: Young people, this time all girls, are mostly on their own facing terrible conditions. Sickness and death, too little food, no contact with their families, only two adults supervising all contribute to less-than-civilized behavior. Fights break out easily. Appearance —looking good —is no longer an issue because the Tox has made them all look inhuman in some way. In this way, the book is an interesting study in behavior under duress.
I did think, however, that the story would go somewhere different than it did: I kept expecting a big secret or twist, and while there were some things being kept secret from the girls, those facts, once revealed, didn’t have the impact on the story I thought they would. The book was just kind of a sad slog through the results of a nasty sickness in a small group of isolated females, and it didn’t do much for me.
Rated: High, for just under 10 uses of strong language and some other instances of milder language. There are some references to girl-girl relationships and kissing. There is violence throughout and gory details about what the Tox does to people’s bodies, as well as a suicide by knife.
* I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
