Title: Wilder Girls
Author: Rory Power
Genres: Young adult, horror, mystery
Published: July 9th 2019, by Delacorte Press
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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.

It’s like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don’t know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over.

There's a lot to love about Wilder Girls. The atmosphere, the prose - it leads to a lot of chilling scenes that makes the horror elements so well done. It starts out fairly slow, with our mc at her school and sort of explaining what her world is, and I found myself itching for it to really pick up. It wasn't until about the halfway mark that it started to build, but once it did, I couldn't put it down. I loved the body horror & creepy tox that spreads and changes girls.

But my favourite thing about the world was this sense of acceptance - these girls on this island, they're allowed to be monstrous. Every girl there has changed in a way that is seen as unnatural or inhuman, yet to them it has become normal - they've adapted to it, and for some, there's even a sense of pride. The juxtaposition (though subtle) between these men off the island, trying to find a cure, and terrified of what these girls have become, versus how the girls have adapted is very well done. There's also just, unapologetic sapphic relationships and characters which was so nice.

She’s never liked us much, not since she complained that there were no boys on the island, and Reese gave her the blankest look I’ve ever seen and said, “Plenty of girls, though."

From about half way through to the 90% mark, I was loving this. I enjoyed the pov of the main character's best friend more than the main character's, it was creepy and disjointed and lead to some clever untangling of the plot, but the last 10% kind of let this down for me. The build up was so exciting that when I got to the conclusion it just felt - disappointing. I wanted more from it. The ending was very abrupt and felt almost rushed, and there were some plot threads that I felt wrapped up in an unsatisfying way (and one I noticed wasn't explained at all), which isn't necessarily an inherently bad thing in a horror novel, but somehow didn't work here for me. This however does not mean this book is bad at all (in fact a lot about it is fantastic), and I feel like the good outweighs the less good.

Ultimately the best thing about this book for me was the build up, the scenes of body horror, and the narrative of the way these girls have adapted to their changes. I'd recommend giving this a go if you're looking for a unique sapphic horror story - especially if you're fairly new to the horror genre.

Trigger warning for: self harm, suicide, body horror, gore