Eighteen months. That's how long it's been since the Tox first attacked the pupils at the Raxter school, isolated on their own island. The girls have spent the time since waiting for the cure they were promised, hiding behind the school fence as the Tox mutates the animal and plant life. Only two of their teachers are left. The others have died or lost themselves to the forest.
There's more going on in this book, but to be honest it's taken me two hours to write that much. This novel has gotten a lot of praise, but I didn't enjoy it. I forced myself back to it, over and over, sure that I had to be missing something. So many people raved about it! I must be just missing the point, right?
This novel doesn't have a point, that I could find. It's a bunch of extremely poetic descriptions interrupted occasionally for some gore. It's unremittingly dark. Byatt seems to have deliberately spread the infection to the only person who was genuinely nice to her. Headmistress's big shocking revelation is completely obvious. The book doesn't end so much as stop dead.
But damn if it isn't an absolutely amazing cover.
TRIGGER WARNINGS; body horror, some gore, some general jump scares.
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her.
It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything.
But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. And when she does, Hetty learns that there's more to their story, to their life at Raxter, than she could have ever thought true.
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her.
It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything.
But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. And when she does, Hetty learns that there's more to their story, to their life at Raxter, than she could have ever thought true.
I have heard a lot of amazing things about this book, yet I am hesitant to read it. X_X
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