Audiobook Review – The Wilds (The Wilds, Book 1) by Donna Augustine, Narrated by Angel Clark (3.5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic
Length: 7 hours and 47 minutes (350 pages)
Publisher: Strong Hold Publishing
Release Date: December 28, 2015
ASIN: B019R3CB7U
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in The Wilds series
Source: Audiobook from Audible.com
Rating: 3.5/5 stars

“My name is Dahlia, but I’m called a Plaguer, a person who survived the Bloody Death. When the virus first hit the world, it ravaged the human race. I thought I was lucky to survive it, but survival comes at a cost. Ever since the sickness, I see things, and I’m hunted for these visions.

Some seek me out because they want to keep their secrets safe. They don’t want the world to know the truth of what they are. Others, like Dax, want my knowledge. Dax has secrets of his own, but as long as he helps me evade the Dark Walkers, he can keep them.

This book is for all the Plaguers, the truth sayers branded and marked as liars, often hunted and sometimes forgotten. This book is for the girl who was right.”

This is the first book in The Wilds series by Augustine, there are four books in this series. This story was not what I thought it was going to be (for some reason I thought it involved magic and faerie…no idea where I got that from). The book is decently written but is a pretty stereotypical YA post-apocalyptic book.

I bought the audiobook bundle for this but am reviewing the books separately. I wouldn’t recommend listening to this on audiobook because I wasn’t a fan of the narrator. The narrator has a lot of trouble with character voices, making them very high-pitched and strident. Some of the voices are just plain hard to listen to. In addition to that the volume she reads at is very inconsistent so I kept having to turn the volume up when Dahlia was talking and then turning it down when Bookie was talking.

This is a post-apocalyptic story about a girl who was institutionalized after surviving the Bloody Death; she is called Plaguer and is determined to escape captivity. After escaping (with the assistance of a mysterious boy) she finds out the Wilds are not what she thought they would be. In addition it appears that she may have special powers and that everything she was told about Beasts and Plaguers may be wrong.

There are a lot of questions left unanswered at the end of this book. We still don’t understand how being a Plaguer has really affected Dahlia and what is up with the Beasts that roam the Wilds.

Overall this was an okay read but not great. I think I would have liked reading it more on paper or ebook format. The characters act fairly juvenile throughout and this isn’t all that creative of a concept. I would tentatively recommend if you like reading post-apocalyptic YA books with a heavy dose of romance in them.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Goodreads Reading Challenge
– Mount TBR Reading Challenge