So I read this book. It's called Wilder Girls, and the reason why I was intrigued to read it, is because similar to our own reality circa. 2020 and the pandemic of COVID, the girls in this novel are dealing with a virus of their own. Given that this was published back in 2019, and therefore means it was written before COVID, I was curious to see where this author decided to take the idea...
I was heavily disappointed.
Just the bare necessities -- Wilder Girls chronicles the lives of 3 best friends attending a boarding school in the middle of an island, when they are inexplicably infected with a virus. They refer to it as the Tox, and it begins to mutate their bodies, eventually killing them. The girls believe that the Navy and the CDC are working on a cure, that they just need to be patient and stay alive...
Now that sounds pretty interesting, right?! I mean, how can it go wrong!? There are lots of things that an author can do with that!
Well, I tell you what... The book was immediately ruined for me by only page 25, when the narrator felt the need to tell us:
"Byatt'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.'
It made something jump in my chest, something I can still feel at night when Reese's braid casts a rippling glow on the ceiling. A reaching. A wish."
Obviously insinuating there would be a romantic relationship between the two girls later on.
And I was able to see this coming even before reading the goddamn thing, because of one based fact: modern literature is crap.
Not just for the cliche relationship -- please, you must hear more! The anti-climactic reveal of the virus' origins, the question that defined the entire novel... Do you want to know how the Tox's origins were revealed? Near the end of the book, where the girls discover some school charts of the yearly temperatures, and it is revealed that the permafrost containing the Tox virus has just eventually melted over time, thereby releasing it onto the island. First of all, lame, and secondly, hasn't that been done a million times before?!
Wanna know how it ends? 🙄 The Navy sends the school a vial of poisonous gas, for the girls to kill themselves with; they don't. A huge Tox-infected bear attacks the school, and I don't even know how that ended, it was so goddamn boring... The narrator just.. all of a sudden finds out there's a way off the island, because now the one girl who knows the way off is her girlfriend, so now the girlfriend starts telling her things (on page fucking 316 of 350 pages). They get in a boat, start making it off the island, and it ends. No real conclusion, no catharsis -- the end.
And for whatever reason, the author kept feeling the need to tell the reader about how Tox affects women differently, because of the hormone estrogen, and just doesn't go anywhere with that fact 🙄🤦♀️
Like, what!? 😅 And I can't be the only one noticing this growing trend of "refusing to write a fulfilling conclusion?" Like, for the sake of the author protecting themselves from criticism? Or is it just pure laziness, "let the reader use their imagination! 🤩"
If this novel had been part of an ongoing series, that would have been different... But there was still so much potential to keep the story going! Maybe the Navy would have shot them on sight! Maybe the girls would have discovered a cure in time! Maybe they don't and they painfully die in each other's arms!