#men suffering on boats is my favourite genre

[carpe-mamilia]

someone. appears to have uploaded the entireity of the terror to youtube?

if you want to bully people into watching it your time is now, I guess?

Hot diggetty pig!

Everyone watch this or I'll come to your house and make slightly hurtful remarks about your storage solutions. But I won't be held responsible for any subsequent obsessions relating to Men Suffering on Boats. It's a life-changing series and you'll just have to deal with the consequences of that yourselves.

#my own storage solutions are: a) floor b) The Pile #thank you very much anon! #the terror amc #the terror #men suffering on boats is my favourite genre #franklin expedition #polar exploration

[semper-legens]

7. Wilder Girls, by Rory Power

Owned: Yes Page count: 353 My summary: They were told to survive. They were told there might be a cure. But for the girls abandoned at the Raxter School for Girls, such hopes seem remote. The Tox swept through their home, changing their bodies and their lives forever. Hetty is determined to survive, with her friends Byatt and Reese. But Reese is distant, and Byatt is missing, and Hetty must do the impossible if she is to survive. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I went into this one completely blind - a friend of mine bought me it for Christmas, though I think we’d talked about it at some point before. It was pitched to me as Lord of the Flies, But With Lesbians, which is a solid basis for a plot in my book. I’m always down for some YA dystopia/post-apocalypse, it’s one of my favourite genres, and I’m happy to say that this book didn’t disappoint!

First of all - while I’ve described this as Lord of the Flies but with girls, really I’m not sure how apt a comparison that is. Sure, this book’s surface-level thing is similar to Lord of the Flies’ surface-level thing of implicitly rich kids being stranded in an apocalyptic environment, plus criticisms of an aspect of everyday society, but I didn’t really see much that was similar between the two other than that. And if it’s not a comparison made by the author, it does feel a bit demeaning to her work to tie it so closely to someone else’s? Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, let’s actually talk about this book. The main characters are Hetty, one of the girls at the school who was left when the Tox began, and Byatt, her friend who suffers a flare-up of the virus and disappears at the end of the first act. These two are out POV characters, and the perspective switches every so often. Rounding out their trio is Reese, their cold and distant friend who is determined to find out what happened to her father, one of the few adult men on the island. Hetty is something of an everywoman, but I think it works well here - she’s loyal and decent, but still affected by what happened, coping by forming a tight and somewhat codependant relationship with Byatt. Byatt’s more of a wild card, and definitely not capable of giving the kind of relationship Hetty wants. Meanwhile, getting to know Reese is a large subplot, right up to the part where Hetty kisses her and all of her coldness is recontextualised as her hiding her feelings. She also really wants to find her dad, and that’s a huge focus as well as a parallel between her and Hetty’s desire to find Byatt.

Overall, the girls work well together, and the mystery unfolds nicely. There’s sort of three strands to unravel - what is the Tox, where is Byatt, and what is really going on in Raxter? Hetty starts to learn the latter when she’s assigned the best job going, Boat Patrol, and gets to participate in retrieving food drops. Hetty’s growing mistrust of everyone around her builds just as the reader sees that something strange is going on.

The Tox itself is an interesting device. It’s definitely a fantasy illness, because it affects each girl differently - one has gills, Reese has a scaled hand, Byatt grows a second spine, Hetty’s eye closes over and she can feel another eyelid growing beneath. It’s legitimately creepy and cool, especially because it goes largely unexplained for most of the novel, leaving a sense of mystery and fear as well as just being an inventive premise.

Because the biggest theme in this is resisting authority. Hetty learns that her teachers at the school are lying to the girls and going behind their backs, and at the end, help the government/military attempt to murder all of the girls in the school. They have been using and experimenting on them, without their knowledge or consent, and it’s legitimately horrifying! Hetty goes into this accepting her place in their new order and ends up leaving the school and everything behind with her friends, knowing they can trust only each other. (This is in contrast again to Lord of the Flies, whose central idea was more ‘rich kids left alone will not be Proper Little Gentlemen and will in fact mimic the oppressive structures they came from or create their own.’) The government promised a cure, promised help, but it turns out all they were interested in was studying the girls, and the teacher Hetty thought was against them was actually trying to save them.

That’s about all I got for this one - next up, are you ready for some glitter?

#Wilder Girls #Rory Power #bookblr #book blogger #book blog