Wild Things by Brigid Delaney
My rating: 3/5 cats
meh-meh.
i mean, a tag line “like “the boys are behaving badly” over a backdrop of a posh boarding school with a deliberate shout-out to both The Secret History and bret easton ellis in the blurbs, and you know i’m going to buy this and tell blair about it. she beat me to the review 1) because she is awesome and 2) because when i finished it, i was just a weak shrug. it was fine, it was good, but it doesn’t even peer into The Secret History‘s windows. it’s got the trappings of s.h.—campus full of entitled characters, secret society, murder and cover-up, but that’s all just window dressing—it misses the spirit of s.h. utterly. it’s kind of like this:
cute but no cigar.
not that this book is cute at all. it’s dark and brutal and filled with reprehensible characters. the strength of s.h. is in its characters, and this one just has…too many. there are about ten present at the crime itself, plus a couple back on campus who orbit the aftermath, and it’s all done in (third-person) POV chapters, but there is an uneven distribution, where all of a sudden you will be reading a chapter and thinking, “wait, this guy gets a POV chapter? who is he again?” and yet there are boys who were present at the crime who get no chapters at all, so you have to wonder, from a reader’s perspective—why are they even characters? wouldn’t it have made more sense to just streamline the cast a little if they were just going to be shadowy background lumps? is sam’s perspective really that different from toby’s? and hadrien is the character you most want a POV chapter from, as the albino ringleader; the embodiment of cruelty, but his thoughts and motivations remain mysterious. which is appropriate, i suppose, but i really think his perspective would have been a welcome break from the guilt-ridden “do we or don’t we?” from the rest of the bunch.
a few notes on triggers.
animals. when i first started reading this, and learned about the campus tradition of having live exotic animals running all over the lawns, i felt a chekhovian frisson and worried for their safety. but phew—except for a flashback mention of a horrible situation in the past, the animals make it out okay. however—those of you with animal-cruelty triggers, there is a kangaroo who is not so fortunate. and it is horrible, horrible, horrible, and circled back to more than once.
those of you with cruelty-to-women triggers may also want to take a pass, because there’s a good deal of that, too. in addition to which, the two female POV perspectives we get don’t really do any favors to feminism. it’s all body-dysmorphia and rape brushed off as experimentation and boys boys boys.
those of you with cruelty-to-foreign-exchange-students triggers, well, if you read this book after reading the synopsis, i suppose you only have yourself to blame.
one of my biggest gripes about it is that it is completely lacking in anything resembling academic elitism, which is a real strength in s.h. and some other s.h. wanna-bes. this is no cadre of brilliant and quirky geniuses who get themselves into trouble. education is not a priority for these characters. this is more like a drunken frat hazing gone wrong, where a bunch of vicious athletes behave like thugs and try to cover it up. it is more akin to an SVU episode than the more elegant criminality of s.h.
also, i kept forgetting that these were supposed to be characters who were mostly 19-20 years old. there’s a real emotional immaturity here, and i feel that if they were younger, their behavior afterwards might be more excusable, and the act itself might be more shocking.
overall, it’s fine. i’m griping a lot just because i read a lot of these books that mention The Secret History as a readalike, and so many of them fall short. it is more similar to Crime and Punishment; a book it references several times. but just as a “privileged boys behaving badly” story, it’s a good read, and there are scenes that will stay with you, for better or worse.
i love you, sad kangaroo.
read my book reviews on goodreads
