Review: "The Wildelings" by Lisa Harding

The Wildelings by Lisa Harding
Published April 2025 via HarperVia
★★★

It's been Jessica and Linda against the world since the first day of school—Jessica leading the way, and Linda pulled in her wake. Jessica is a big fish in a small pond, and that's just the way she likes it. At university, though, things change: Jessica's big-fish status is challenged. She has the upper hand sometimes—but not always. Linda is pulling away from Jessica, becoming less reliant on her and less willing to put up with her. But it's Linda's boyfriend Mark, and the play he has cast Jessica in, that will turn them all upside-down.

I read this largely based on the strength of Harding's Cloud Girls, which I read a couple of years ago. Harding doesn't shy away from difficult topics—Cloud Girls explores sex trafficking and child abuse, and The Wildelings gets into manipulation and toxic relationships.

What works really well for me: Jessica is not a particularly sympathetic character. One of the things she struggles so much with throughout the book is that the people around her do not react to her low-key bullying in the way that she expects them to; Wilde is a bigger pond than she's used to, and although she does fine, she doesn't soar in the way she would have expected.

He looked [...] way cooler than when we had first met. It stung that I was not the reason for this transformation. (loc. 3472*)

This does not make Jessica likeable, but it does make her interesting, and that's a huge plus point for me. There are all these human flaws in Jessica that she can see but not quite stop herself from charging forward with anyway—her jealousy, her selfishness, her unkindness. She's gotten away with it because she's attractive and confident, I suppose, and because nobody has called her out on it...until now. And gosh, she does not understand how poorly equipped she is to be called on it.

This takes place mostly in the 90s, a time Jessica describes as back then, it was thrilling to be a number on a list, ranked by your body parts (loc. 473). There's a lot in her story that she doesn't understand until later (i.e., not until the parts of the story that take place much later), and parts of the book make for a masterful take on self-blame and shame. Because: Jessica does have some things coming—again, she's a complex character—but not the things that happen to her.

What doesn't work for me as well: although the majority of the book takes place in the 90s, it's structured around flashbacks (or the things Jessica is writing) when she is much older and in therapy. The processing-it-all-through-conversations-with-a-therapist trope (can I call this a trope?) has never worked well for me. There's an extent to which it does make a lot of sense here—the therapist is able to offer Jessica compassion when she has none for herself, and to reassign some guilt and blame after scenes in which Jessica does not come off well. But as engaging (and sometimes hard to read) as I found the Wilde sections to be, I was thrown out of that every time we came back to the present (or present-ish) day.

So something of a mixed bag for me, but more good than bad. Save this one when you're in the mood for something pretty intense. I'm looking forward to whatever Harding comes up with next.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.