4.5/5 stars

I picked up this book having never heard of it and quite honestly I didn’t read the synopsis, I saw the cover filled with colors and diversity and I knew I had to read it.

What I liked about this book was the authors ability to tell a story that was both balanced between fantasy and real life events.

Although the cover is beautiful and the book is no doubt fantasy, what I took away from it is that this book was written as away to highlight how girls of color have been silenced and mistreated by others for years. While this book is full of trauma and potentially triggering content, I thought the author did a great job balancing this trauma with joy, and happiness. In the end the book highlighted how strong, amazing, and beautiful women are.

I would like to note that it doesn’t appear that the traumas were placed in this book to dump on the readers or to pull on heartstrings. It felt as though it was meticulously placed as way to echo much of reality in an authentic way. I sometimes struggle with trauma being placed in stories as a thrill factor, twists, or to elicit favorable emotional reactions and this book did not do that.

There were a few things that I didn’t particularly like about the story. The first half of the book was slow and felt like an information dump at times. I had a hard time keeping up. On top of that, there is about 10-11 different characters. This is something that I struggle with that in books as I can’t keep up with what information I need to remember. However in this story, it was largely done because the “wild ones” are meant to be one entity, which I liked. It give me freshwater/bunny vibes.

Overall I enjoyed this book, but it’s definitely going to require a reread. I think if I had time to really flesh out and process some of the details I might be able to rate a little higher.

CW/TW: misogyny, sexual violence, kidnapping, sexual assault, rape, suicide, trafficking, death of parent