Wilder Girls

Wilder Girls is a novel for young adults by the American writer Rory Power, published on 9 July 2019.

The book is set on an island off the coast of Maine where a school for girls has been under quarantine for eighteen months. The illness known as the Tox came first to the plants and the animals and then to the girls, who develop changes in their bodies that are different for each of them: an extra spine, hair that lights up, skin that has scaled over. The school still receives supplies from the United States Navy, though not enough to keep anybody comfortable, and the isolation has turned the place into a society of teenage girls with its own rules and its own losses. The novel is told by Hetty, whose attention is fixed on her friend Byatt, and it is written as body horror rather than as a medical mystery, with the reader kept as ignorant of what is happening on the mainland, and of what the navy knows, as the girls are.