"Wilding" is tightly focused on Zena, a sixteen-year-old girl living in a New York City of the not-too-far-distant future. She is an antihero, which is a literary term that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s to describe, for example, a character that is graceless, inept, sometimes stupid, sometimes dishonest—a protagonist who lacks heroic qualities. These are not qualities of the traditional heroic figure, yet the protagonist does perform heroic deeds.

Zena has unsavory qualities. Typical of her thinking is "'Wilding' is a pure New York sport. No mushy woggers need apply." This is bigotry. She is a show-off who mistakes being "coolish" with being intelligent. Much of the suspense of the story depends on her contempt for wisdom and her belief that she is smarter than she actually is. In her choice of friends, coolish is everything: "There was something coolish...