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.

I was really hoping to like this book, and I did, for most of the beginning, until I realized how many things it actually lacked to be a satisfying, well-wrapped read. I’ve always had problems writing 3-star reviews because in most cases the lines between what I liked about them and what I didn’t blurred. Everything about the description of Wilder Girls screamed a good adventure – a horror sapphic novel about a mysterious disease that starts spreading through the all-girls school, but when it came to the realization, I was left with a bitter feeling of inconsistencies and general discontent. As the pages turned, my excitement for this book slowly died, my curiosity for its mysteries disappeared, until only remaining emotions were indifference and the anticipation for the end.

I’m sorry book with a cute cover, but you weren’t enough.

This book is set in a School for Girls on Raxter island where, 18 months ago, a previously unknown disease emerged. It’s called Tox, it skips no one - it alters one’s body and there doesn’t seem to be a cure for it. Symptoms vary from host to host, but in the end, they all come to the same thing: painful, bloody outbursts and death. It took them one by one first the teachers and then the most sickly girls, yet no help came from the outside world. The government has put them under quarantine, sending them food and supplies from time to time, but it’s never enough to sustain already dying patients. After one of the older girls quit the boat shift, Hetty gets a chance to break the monotony of their survival and participate in one of the most valued jobs among the girls – collecting the supplies. Little she knows about the dangers that lie in the woods and betrayals that will come from the ones she trusts the most.

The thing about this book is… well, it’s really likable, in the beginning at least. It gets you in with its beautiful prose and inspiring storytelling, with intriguing concepts and picturesque descriptions. I really enjoyed reading it until I realized some basic elements, like plot consistency and character development, were heavily unrepresented. As the plot moved further, I was only less impressed and grew more indifferent to anything that happened. The plot twists were dull and kind of expected, and the climax wasn’t really anything but another scene that I read with half-hearted interest. To be honest there are still a lot of things that I couldn’t catch up because they were insufficiently explained or badly elaborated.

Reading this book (and I am dead serious when I say this) could’ve gone pretty much the same without any characters in it. Seriously, those girls were so very underdeveloped that I could have had the same reading experience from the perspective of a rock. I wanted to like these characters, I really did, but there just wasn’t anything for me to hold on to. Their backstories were barely there, their dialogues vague and the eternity of Hetty’s inner monologue came down to two things: Hetty wanting to save Byatt and Hetty liking Reese.

It’s not that I didn’t like this book, it is just that I didn’t care about it at all. What seemed to be like a good and interesting horror read turned out to be a mediocre novel.


Btw is there going to be a sequel to this? Because I cannot imagine it ending like that. Too many things left unfinished.