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    Wild Girls: A Novel
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    Wild Girls: A Novel
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    Wild Girls: A Novel
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    Wild Girls: A Novel

    By Mary Stewart Atwell

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, this daringly imagined, atmospheric, and original debut is part coming-of-age story and part supernatural tale about teenage girls learning their own strength.

    Daringly imagined, atmospheric, and original, Wild Girls is an exhilarating debut—part coming-of-age story and part supernatural tale about girls learning their own strength.

    Kate Riordan fears two things as she grows up in the small Appalachian town of Swan River: that she’ll be a frustrated townie forever or that she’ll turn into one of the mysterious and terrifying wild girls, killers who start fires and menace the community. Struggling to better her chances of escaping, Kate attends the posh Swan River Academy and finds herself divided between her hometown—and its dark history—and the realm of privilege and achievement at the Academy. Explosive friendships with Mason, a boy from the wrong side of town, and Willow, a wealthy and popular queen bee from school, are slowly pulling her apart. Kate must decide who she is and where she belongs before she wakes up with cinders at her fingertips.

    Mary Stewart Atwell has written a novel that is at once funny and wise and stunningly inventive. Her wild girls are strange and fascinating creatures—a brilliant twist on the anger teenage girls can feel at their powerlessness—and a promise of the great things to come from this young writer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateOct 16, 2012
    ISBN9781451683295
    Author

    Mary Stewart Atwell

    Mary Stewart Atwell's short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices and The Best American Mystery Stories. She grew up in southwest Virginia and now lives in Missouri.

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    Reviews for Wild Girls

    3.5/5

    5 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I fell in love with Sawn River and was fascinated by the Wild Girls. Mary S. Atwell did a brillant job with character development as well and the "love triangle" as this young coming-of-age novel is anything but typical. I cannot wait for my daughter to read it so we can talk about it! Bright 5 stars from me!My rating system is as follows:5 stars - Excellent, Worth Every Penny, Made It Into My Personal Library!4 stars - Great book, but not a classic. 3 stars - Good overall, generally well written.2 stars - Would not recommend based on personal criteria.1 star - Difficult to read, hard to finish, or didn't finish. Wouldn't recommend purchasing or reading.In accordance with the FTC Guidelines for blogging and endorsements, you should assume that every book I review was provided to me by the publisher, media group or the author for free and no financial payments were received, unless specified otherwise.
    • 4/5
      I am happy to say that the circumstances under which I am reading this book is that this is a summer reading given to me by Hollins University, not only the college I am enrolled in but the college the author herself has graduated from. That said, I put off reading this book enough, I think.I came in with rather low expectations, partially because I believed due to past experience that books assigned by schools are really suckish and partially because of the cover art - it seems rather cheesy to me, like any other book of rebellious teenagers. Thus, the first thing I would change about this book is the cover art; in my opinion, it really does not do the story justice.The premise of the story is rather impressive. The "Wild Girls" in this book are like enchanted beings, bringing together the myths of witches and countless other legends, none of them completely accurate in describing just what they are. All the readers can know for certain is that random girls become homicidal primal women with the ability to control fire, fly, and possibly control the minds of a small group and turn them into Wild Girls as well.It really is a wonderful story, though there are a couple things that holds it back in my mind (other than the cover, I mean): for one, in my personal taste, it's too much drama and too little macabre - but, then again, I know many people will not feel the same way. My only other complaint is that, upon revealing who was behind creating more Wild Girls than what was already running rampant, he suffered a rather quick and pathetic end, leaving the only true threat of the story to be the Wild Girls themselves. Someone that could have been seen as more or less the mastermind of the evil bubbling up in the Appalachians could have come back after said end or at least extend the scene to make the situation a tad heavier.All of that being said, those are the only true negative points I could find. The cover, a certain death, and my personal taste. That's it. It may be the fact that I have the write an essay on this that I'm thinking more critically, but the personal growth of the main character, Kate, is remarkable. She grows in terms of the friends she keeps, her perception of her town and her family, and the so-called "minions" of her high school. Also, I could very much relate, as I think many others can, to the idea that a person's hometown is not only where you don't want to be in the future but also a place where you feel no one should live - that it is a complete trap of a town where it seems that no one who enters will reach their full potential. It was a very powerful theme throughout and really pulled the book together.Wild Girls is a supernatural spin on the angst and worries young women feel before starting life after high school. I especially recommend it as a YA book because as someone around the same age, myself included - having just graduated, a reader can really put themselves in the book and see the Wild Girls for what they really are, what had transformed them in the first place.
    • 1/5
      There are times when the serendipity offered up by the New Books shelf at the library causes me great joy, and there are times when it causes me to curse the day I ever learned to read. Today it's the latter. I am not sure what exactly I expected (something 70s, with free love, I think), but horror was certainly not on my list for today. I stay away from horror on purpose, mostly because it's, um, horrifying. I stuck with it for the first 150 pages, but then I started to skip and skim and peek through my fingers and flinch and shudder. Things caught on fire. People died in gruesome fashions. Old men were skeevy and good men were apathetic. Girls got knocked up and knocked down.

      Perhaps it's a good horror book, I don't know. I hated it. Maybe you'll like it. If you do, don't tell me.