They told us to wait and stay alive
Raxter Island, Maine, is home to the Raxter School for Girls and little else. Or at least it was, until the Tox struck; now having been in strict quarantine for 18 months, the students and their two surviving teachers are in a daily struggle against illness, starvation, and the mutated forests surrounding the schoolgrounds.
Wilder Girls is the 2019 debut Young Adult novel from Rory Power. In addition to combining elements of survival horror with a myriad of accent genres, it is noted for its casual inclusion of LGBT characters.
This novel provides example of:
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Invoked with the "Raxter blue" crabs.
- Bad Black Barf: Mr. Harker, the school groundskeeper and Reese's dad, starts throwing up black sludge once he contracts the Tox.
- Bears Are Bad News: During Hetty's first trip on the Boat Shift, the team encounters a bear, but they manage to avoid engaging with it. Later, a bear infected with the Tox invades the school grounds and does get into the building.
- Blood from the Mouth: Welch and Headmistress are always bleeding from their mouth due to boils on their tongues.
- Boarding School of Horrors: Before the Tox, Raxter is a regular boarding school for girls, albeit a bit strict (no cell phones allowed, uniforms required). Afterwards, the girls are completely cut off from the world (they can't even communicate with their families in the mainland), and they have to deal with the meager food supply.
- Body Horror: The Tox manifests in wildly different forms for every person (or creature, as it also affects animals) that it infects, and almost all of them manifest as this. Byatt is noted to be one of the relatively luckier girls, and she has jagged bones from the second spine ripping through her back.
- Brown Note: After her flare-up part way through the book, Byatt's voice becomes a harsh and guttural sound that causes immense pain to everyone around her when she speaks, because it matches the resonance frequency of human bone.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Early on, Hetty mentions that all of the girls know how to open a bullet and swallow the gunpowder if the Tox gets unbearable. Late in the book, Headmistress tries to poison the bottled water with gunpowder, and Hetty forces her to drink one in retribution.
- When Hetty's sealed-up eye is described, she often mentions that she can feel something growing behind it. The final moments of the book have her realize that the Tox is a parasite that's been living inside all of them, meaning that she was likely feeling it moving inside her.
- Chromosome Casting: By virtue of being set at an all-girls school on a quarantined island. The only male characters even mentioned by name are Mr. Harker and Teddy.
- Downer Ending: After Byatt breaks containment, the government pulls out and the situation on Raxter destabilizes quickly, with Hetty killing Taylor and Headmistress after they attempt to gas the students, a bear attacking the school, and the Navy launching jets to bomb the school just to be sure there are no survivors. She and Reese abandon the other girls to die, find a severely wounded and possibly Empty Shell Byatt, and attempt to make for the mainland in a battered boat, with only a tenuous hope of a cure, if they make it that far.
- Driven to Suicide: Welch, when the last boat drop consists only of a canister of Deadly Gas. She realizes that the government stopped trying to find a cure.
- Empty Shell: The Tox sometimes manifests as this, hollowing out people and leaving nothing but the infection, which sometimes turns them feral or leaves them aware enough to commit suicide. After removing her parasite, Byatt is also noted to be empty, implying that the parasite had become so linked to her that she effectively died when she removed it.
- Establishing Character Moment: Reese has two. For the reader, when she fights Hetty tooth and nail for an orange. For the other girls, when she replies to a complaint of there being no boys on the island with "Plenty of girls, though."
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Headmistress is always called simply "Headmistress".
- First-Person Perspective: The majority of the story takes place from Hetty's perspective, with shorter sections from Byatt's perspective.
- Freudian Slip: When Byatt is under lock and key at the infirmary, the Headmistress tells Hetty that her friend is lucky to have Hetty "looking for her". When Hetty repeats the latter three words ("Looking for her?"), Headmistress corrects herself with a strained smile: "Looking out for her." This is one of the first hints Hetty gets that something is wrong.
- Gainax Ending: The finale gets very rushed and Hetty's narration becomes more frantic and frayed as the situation on Raxter destabilizes rapidly and she deals with a flare up in the final chapters, making her observations even less clear.
- Genre-Busting: It's a bio-horror medical survival mystery thriller with LGBT elements. Or something.
- Green Aesop: Very late in the book, Hetty and Reese discover the Tox is a parasitic organism that spent eons trapped in ice that's finally melting due to Global Warming.
- Girls Love Chocolate: A single chocolate bar comes in with the rations and is split among the Boat Shift girls. Hetty feels guilty for enjoying her share.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Zig-zagged with Reese, whose blonde hair literally glows thanks to the Tox, but is initially cold and tough. However, she defrosts as the book progresses.
- Implied Death Threat: Ms. Welch, after seeing Hetty's disbelief that half the food must be thrown away:"I told you, Hetty: I picked you because I thought you could handle it. Admittedly, sometimes I'm wrong about people. And if that's the case, we can take care of that just fine." She moves slightly, and I watch as her hand rests on the butt of her revolver where it's tucked in the waistband of her jeans.
- Last-Name Basis: Mr. Harker, Reese's father, is never given a first name.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Headmistress laced bottles of water with gunpowder for the girls to drink, and later claims that it was to spare them from the pain. Hetty force-feeds the poisoned water to Headmistress, so that she can find out for herself how painless death by gunpowder poisoning is. Hint: it is painful.
- Magical Realism: The Tox causes some people to exhibit unnatural abilities, such as Reese's glowing hair or Byatt's voice becoming a Brown Note.
- Mercy Kill:
- Mary, one of the girls, is left in a feral state as a result from the Tox. Her girlfriend Taylor is forced to shoot her in the head. Another girl asks Taylor if that was why she quit Boat Shift and Taylor backhands her across the face.
- Headmistress claims that this was her intent when she leads the girls into the music room and releases the Deadly Gas, and the same with the water bottles with gunpowder.
- No Name Given: Headmistress.
- No Periods, Period: Justified, as Byatt mentions that none of the girls have gotten their period since falling ill with the Tox. Headmistress is also speculated to be post-menopausal.
- Plant Person: It's noted that testosterone changes the effects of the Tox, incorporating more plant features in both Teddy and Mr. Harker.
- Posthumous Character: Mr. Harker. Reese is hopeful that he's still alive somewhere until she and Hetty encounter his monstrous, Tox-animated corpse.
- Tampering with Food and Drink:
- This is the reason why Welch throws away most of the food that arrives in the air drops: to sabotage the government's efforts to test cures on the girls.
- Headmistress has been holding back supplies and food and keeping them in her office, in case she needs to escape. Reese and Hetty go to pick up water bottles and distribute them, but notice that they have broken seals and a black powder in the bottom. It's gunpowder, which will kill whoever drinks it.
- Unwitting Test Subject: Everyone on Raxter, as the government and Headmistress knew about the properties of the Tox and were studying it long before any of the protagonists arrived on the island. It's also implied that the government was never really looking for a cure, having declared the victims dead, and opting instead to study the effects of the Tox on humans in hopes of replicating it in a controlled fashion.
