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. 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 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. But Byatt isn't in the infirmary. Hetty, deciding to break quarantine to find her friend, goes outside the school's borders and finds things far worse than the Tox.
Rory Power's debut 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 and doesn't pit the girls against each other, either--all of them have the Tox, which means everyone is on equal footing. 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