RaveThe Young FolksThe thing you should know before starting Wilder Girls by Rory Power is that it is excruciatingly beautiful and excruciatingly brutal. The prose packs a punch that steals your breath away from the get-go until you’re 300 something pages in and still breathless, unable to catch your breath or still your heart due to the fast-paced plot ... Rory Power vividly captures your attention as she describes the sickness that claimed the lives of half of a boarding school and its teachers. The urgency that I felt while reading made the Tox and the fate of protagonist Hetty and her friends even more important to me ... What blossoms and unfolds between Hetty and Reese, at the worst time, is so stunning and human. I loved the way they found each other. It gave me some hope when it looked like the rest of the book would be bleak ... I was left stunned by the ending in a way that I wasn’t expecting ... if this is Rory Power’s debut, I can’t wait for the rest of her novels. I’m sure they will wreck me (in a good way) just as this one did.
