The Wild Girls by Phoebe Morgan
Published 29th April 2021 by HQ
I read so many books. I know my favourite genres so I generally enjoy everything I read. However, maybe three or four times a year I come across a book which I devour in a matter of hours, that leaves me totally breathless. The Wild Girls by Phoebe Morgan was one such book.
The Wild Girls are Felicity, Grace, Hannah and Alice, so named from their younger, wild partying days. Now older, the girls have drifted apart and live very different lives to before and to each other.
Grace lives with her roommate Rosie who mocks her for leading such a quiet, dull life. Alice lives with long term boyfriend Tom, who doesn’t always treat her that well. Hannah is married with a young child and finding that motherhood isn’t the dream she always thought it would be. None of them seem particularly happy. Felicity is the only one who is living her perfect life in New York and appears to have retained her spark from their younger days.
The girls have been estranged since a night out two years previously when all we know from the start is something happened to drive their friendship apart.
The story begins with each of Grace, Hannah and Alice receiving expensive looking invitations to celebrate Felicity’s 30th birthday in a luxurious lodge in Botswana. Felicity has paid for all their flights and accommodation. Despite some reservations all three girls decide to accept the invite and fly out to Botswana together. On arrival they are stunned by the beauty and opulence of the lodge, where they will be staying but just as you start to settle in to the story and the setting you realise nothing is what it seems. Felicity isn’t there to greet them. In fact no-one is there at all and they are left in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal.
I was totally gripped by this story. The scene is set perfectly and the story is told from each girls perspective, simultaneously alternating between the past and present. It is an absolute rollercoaster of a read. Tense and taught with suspension I was holding my breath at times and with so many twists and turns I never saw what was coming. One of the books of 2021 so far for me.
