Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins

From the publisher: Six stunning twentysomethings are about to embark on a blissful, free-spirited journey—one filled with sun-drenched days and intoxicating nights. But as it becomes clear that the group is even more cut off from civilization than they initially thought, it starts to feel like the island itself is closing in, sending them on a dangerous spiral of discovery.

I happen to be going through a phase of revisiting The Eagles, my favorite band when I was in high school, and as soon as I sat down to write this review, “Hotel California” went through my head. For me, that song encapsulates the mood of Rachel Hawkins’s Reckless Girls (and if it’s ever adapted to film, I want credit for the song being used in the movie).

I was excited to read this new book from Hawkins, having really enjoyed The Woman Upstairs. The writing, again, is clean and clear, and Hawkins definitely knows how to create an atmosphere of increasing dread. In many ways, this is a feminist book, looking at how women find themselves defined by the relationships they’re in and how trapped they can become, economically, by those relationships.

Dreams were for people with money and time, people who didn’t feel hollowed out from watching the only person who loved them die in agony. Dreams for people who had choices, opportunities. I didn’t believe I had any of those things.

Rachel Hawkins, Reckless Girls

The island of Meroe serves almost as a character in the book, malevolent and always lurking in the background, which is emphasized by the periodic “postings” included in the book; these postings warn of the weirdness of the island. This Meroe Island, however, appears to be completely fictional, as the Google search only turned up an island belonging to India and an archeological site on the Nile. (A search of my public libraries databases didn’t do me any better.) The fictional history is that it was named after the 1822 wreck of the HMS Meroe, a frigate whose survivors met mysterious ends on the island, including possibly being sacrificed to feed others.

It sounds much like some of the facts of the Essex shipwreck, which inspired Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In that case, though, the three crew members who elected to stay on the island did better than those who sailed on (which is where the cannibalism happened) and the vessel in question was a whaler rather than a frigate. At any rate, there were sufficient shipwrecks on atolls with grisly overtones that Meroe Island of the book resonates as a real place.

The protagonist, Lux, is trying to figure out what she wants to do about her life. She left home with Nico, a rich boy with a boat, to travel the world, but they only got as far as Hawaii, and now she’s beginning to worry about the future. Her recent past was full of pain, and that trauma informs the story. Lux’s trauma, as well as that of other characters, is something others fail to recognize, acknowledge, or feel; and yet Lux feels like she should keep it to herself, as if she’s not entitled to support and understanding. This divide between the traumatized and those who appear to live golden lives free of trauma and want is another theme Hawkins explores.

The truth is, when your world is falling apart, you stop having ‘a thing.’ You get so focused on just making through each day that ‘interests’ or ‘ambitions’ kind of go out the window. You definitely don’t have time for passions.

Rachel Hawkins, Reckless Girls

It’s definitely an unsettling book, and even at the close I still felt unsettled. I’m not sure I like that feeling, but if that was what Hawkins was trying to achieve, she succeeded. The deception of beauty, from the island itself to some of the characters, is a part of what makes it unsettling—what we generally use as a way to keep ourselves safe, judging both places and people by appearances, can have fatal consequences.

And with people like that—people you meet on the road—there’s no real past and no real future. It can all be a glorious present where Eliza can be anyone she wants. She doesn’t have to tell people that her mum is in prison, doesn’t have to confess to the wasted years on wasted men and wasted opportunities.

Rachel Hawkins, Reckless Girls

Reckless Girls is more solid evidence that Rachel Hawkins is an author to watch for deliciously scary thrillers with deep themes; I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

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