Hi Everyone, Happy Monday! Well I hope it’s a happy one for you. I love starting the week off with promoting one of my anticipated reads of this year – WILDER GIRLS by Rory Power. I first heard about this book back last summer and I kept on seeing it across social media – I knew I needed to read it. The cover alone is gorgeous. So I’m super excited to kick this blog tour off for the UK publication of Wilder Girls. I have my copy ready to read so in the meantime for my review I have a guest post prepared for my stop.

Everyone loses something to the Tox; Hetty lost her eye, Reese's hand has changed, and Byatt just disappeared completely.
It’s been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put in quarantine. The Tox turned the students strange and savage, the teachers died off one by one. Cut off from the mainland, the girls don’t dare wander past the school’s fence where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure as the Tox takes; their bodies becoming sick and foreign, things bursting out of them, bits missing.
But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her best friend, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie in the wilderness past the fence. As she digs deeper, she learns disturbing truths about her school and what else is living on Raxter Island. And that the cure might not be a cure at all...

NEW AUTHOR SERIES – IN THE MIND OF AN AUTHOR!

This is actually a new author series I will also be kicking off called ‘In the Mind of an Author.’ where the author chooses an area of their author life or even a visual of their writing desk or places she writes etc. Can be anything. So Rory Power is kicking it off for me. So I hope you enjoy.

Her Writing Inspiration behind Wilder Girls

I’m someone who would at all times rather be inside on my couch, so it’s very unfortunate for me that the thing I find most inspiring for my writing is the natural world. Setting, landscape, atmosphere – these are the things that get me interested in a project, and that always help me figure out the rest of the book.

In winter 2015 I managed to leave my house to visit a friend’s family home on Harkers Island, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I was in an absolutely foul mood that I couldn’t seem to shake, and I was determined to spend the entire trip inside, away from the windows, watching episodes of TV I’d already seen three hundred times.

My friend picked me up at the airport and wisely didn’t comment on the playlist I chose for the drive to the island, which was full of mournful selections from film soundtracks. I spent the whole drive staring out the window, at trees I didn’t recognize, at a sky that felt so much wider than the space between my apartment building and the next. By the time we crossed the bridge onto Harkers, I was on edge, sick from the fresh air sneaking through the just-open window, and not ready to fall completely in love, which is what happened the second we hit Harkers earth.

My friend’s house is on the point of the island, through a gate and up a long, winding driveway. The grounds are covered with ancient live oaks and little bramble thickets, and speckled here and there with patches of marsh grass . I’d never seen anything like it before. I made us pull over at the gate so I could get out and just stand there.

I voluntarily spent most of that trip outside, going for walks around the grounds and sitting on the little pier that jutted out into the water. That feeling – the salt in the air, and the trees pressing in, and looking back over my shoulder at a waiting house – that was Wilder Girls.

I started writing it once I got back to the city, on the ride home from the airport. A map of Harkers Island sketched over and over until it looked like something new and only mine. A handwritten snippet of one teenage girl ripping out another’s tongue piercing, which gave the man reading over my shoulder on the subway a bit of a scare. All of it set on an island, studded with trees and glazed in frost. I couldn’t call it Harkers; I knew that. But the whole book lived and died on that island, and when I wrote about a girl who loved it more than anything, I gave her its name.

About Rory Power

Rory Power grew up in New England, where she lives and works as a crime fiction editor and story consultant for TV adaptation. She received a Masters in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia, and thinks fondly of her time there, partially because she learned a lot but mostly because there were a ton of bunnies on campus.

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Don’t forget to follow the rest of the tour this week.