IDs: Queer, Chronic Illness, Partial Blindness, Sapphic, Terminal Illness

Author IDs: Queer

CWs: Graphic descriptions of injury and illness, quarantine, epidemic, non-consensual medical testing, death

Power’s Wilder Girls takes place at a boarding school on a remote island off the coast of Maine. A mysterious illness called the Tox has ravaged the school, killing most of the students and faculty and leaving those alive with strange and significant disabilities. The survivors are stuck under a strict quarantine, and are not allowed to leave the island. The illness is circular in nature, coming back worse with each "flare up" and never fully healing from the previous cycle. Only two adults have survived the illness, but they are not as sick as the children. The girls that are still alive continue to get sicker each time they have a flare up. 

The story follows three girls, Hetty, Byatt, and Reese, as they navigate their illnesses, relationships, and survival at the abandoned school. The narrative alternates between the perspectives of Hetty and Byatt. Hetty has anophthalmia as a result of the Tox, and her eye is “dead, gone dark in a flare-up. Lid fused shut, something growing underneath” (Power 3). Byatt has a second spine that grew alongside her main spine and then burst out of the skin. One of Reese’s hands is covered in silver scales. Early in the novel, Byatt has a bad flare-up, and is taken upstairs to the “infirmary,” a hidden area that the girls never get to see. Hetty, who was formerly on Gun Shift guarding the school from the strange and feral creatures in the woods, gets promoted to Boat Shift. The Boat Shift girls are responsible for going with Ms. Welch, one of the adults, to pick up supplies that are dropped off for them. Hetty, with the help of Reese, begins to discover and unravel the secrets of Boat Shift, the “infirmary,” and where the sickest girls are actually going. 

The Tox has turned Byatt, Hetty, Reese, and the other girls at the boarding school into survivors. Hetty says at the beginning of the novel that they look out for their own. The girls have split into cliques, and do not intermingle. The novel explores Hetty, Reese, and Byatt coming to terms with their own illnesses, as well as how they begin to reexamine their relationships to the other girls at the school.As the novel progresses and the mysteries of the Tox and the quarantine begin to unravel, the girls in the school begin to adopt a more community-oriented mindset. They become loyal not only to their clique, but to all of the girls in the school.

In Wilder Girls, Power places the speculative within the body, emphasizing the connections between the horror of the Tox and its effects on the bodies of the girls at the school. Power also captures the embodied experience of chronic/terminal illness and queer community care. Byatt, Reese, and Hetty continually care for one another, stitching each other up and holding each other during flare-ups. When Byatt goes missing, Hetty doesn’t hesitate to try to find her. This novel is by no means hopeful, but within this apocalyptic setting, Hetty, Reese, and Byatt learn to navigate their own identities, illnesses, and relationships with one another. They learn to be more active community members, and how to care for their larger community as well as themselves and their clique. Their disabilities do not become magically healed. In fact, for some, they get much worse. Yet their disabilities and the apocalyptic setting doesn’t prevent them from exploring who they are and who they want to be to each other.

Discussion Questions

1. How does Power represent disability in the novel? How is disability connected to the supernatural? To the island? What do these connections mean?

2. Why does Power choose to tell this story at an all-girls school? What is the effect of this? How might this story be different if it was a boys school? A college? A summer camp?

3. What do you think the Tox is? What does it mean?

4. What does the ending of this novel mean? How are we meant to feel about Hetty, Reese, and Byatt? About the Tox?