It's been a year and a half since a mysterious illness called the Tox forced the navy to quarantine the island off the coast of Maine where the Raxter School for Girls is located. Per the declaration, "subjects [are] to remain on school grounds at all times, for safety and to preserve conditions of initial contagion." Only the Boat Shift--a group of Raxter girls chosen specifically for their strength, survival acumen and intelligence--is allowed out. Boat Shift ventures onto the island to pick up the weekly supply of rations and clothes left by the navy, which drops a pallet rather than come in contact with the afflicted. The Tox turns people into "sick, strange" victims with "things bursting out of [them], bits missing, and pieces sloughing off." Those infected face "flare-ups" that leave "their bodies too wrecked to keep breathing." Sometimes, it even manifests as "violence like a fever," turning the "girls against themselves."
Sixteen-year-old best friends Hetty, Byatt and Reese are, like all their classmates, simply trying to survive as they wait for the CDC's promised cure--the cure that will fix Reese's "left hand with its sharp, scaled fingers," Byatt's "serrated ridge of bone down her back" and Hetty's dead eye with "lid fused shut, [and] something growing underneath." When Byatt has a flare-up and is taken to the infirmary, Hetty tries to visit, though it's against the rules. But Byatt isn't in the infirmary--she isn't anywhere. Hetty decides to break quarantine to find her friend, and sneaks off school grounds, but what she faces there is far worse than the Tox.
Rory Power's debut novel, Wilder Girls, is an ode to empowering women and a testament to the strength of female bonds. Power never paints the teenagers as weak females waiting to be rescued, but makes them people trying to survive. She doesn't pit the girls against each other, either--all of them have the Tox, which means everyone is on equal footing. Power also places great emphasis on female relationships. Ever since Hetty met Byatt, the two have been inseparable: "She knew who she was and who I should be," Hetty thinks of Byatt, "and she fit right into all the places in me I couldn't fill." The bond they have is so powerful that after only three years of knowing each other, Hetty loves "Byatt more than anything, more than [herself]," and would do anything for her.
Wilder Girls may be a tough read, with its scenes of self-mutilation, graphic violence, unsolicited medical treatment and suicide; and the setting is eerie, a place where "the wilderness reaches inside" both the girls and the world around them, "seeping into the earth," mutating all living things. But Power's themes of feminism and survival make this novel far more than just an unsettling horror story. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader
Shelf Talker: This powerful debut novel about a strange disease at an all-girls boarding school explores female empowerment, friendship and survival with tenacity and brilliance.