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Book Reviewed by:A feminist Lord of the Flies about three best friends living in quarantine at their island boarding school, and the lengths they go to uncover the truth of their confinement when one disappears. This fresh, new debut is a mind-bending novel unlike anything you've read before.
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.
The two perspectives lead the reader not only through the mystery, but into a meditation on human nature itself, and how people might respond to extraordinary circumstances. Rory Power's Wilder Girls is a powerful novel and a must-read in this current epoch, with urgent messages about what it means to be human when everything is changing...continued
Full Review
(548 words)
(Reviewed by Michelle Anya Anjirbag).
In Rory Powers' debut novel Wilder Girls, the students at the Raxter School for Girls are suffering from a mysterious illness called "the Tox," but other than knowing what the effects are and that some people from the outside world are working on trying to help them, they have no idea what is causing it, or what it even is.
How real is the possibility of a mystery disease affecting a portion of the world in this day and age? It turns out, new viruses are appearing all the time. Existing viruses mutate; antibiotic resistance is a growing concern; new advances in identifying diseases are made; and there is even a concern that climate change, in particular the melting permafrost, will reintroduce viruses that have been dormant for ...
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