St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

My short story category is shaping up to be my favorite this year, bringing me the strangest and most original reading experiences. Young Karen Russell’s debut collection is a weird, dark and pretty wonderful ride. She has a real knack for setting, and lets these stories take place in an abandoned alligator park, on a floating home for the elderly, on a camp for children with creepy sleeping disorders and other unusual places. Just the titles are to die for; if you don’t get interested by the title story or “The Star-Gazer’s log of Summer-Time crime” there’s probably something wrong with your curiosity bone.

But it isn’t all weirdness. At the heart of these stories are teenage main characters wrestling with very relatable show more issues like trying to navigate a dangerous friendship with the school bully, being ashamed of a parent (who in this case happens to be a Minotaur, but still) or just never having been kissed. All in all, this mix of the bizarre, the eerie, the disturbing and the humanly tender reminds me a lot of George Saunders, but without the political aspect. I’ve yet to read Katherine Dunn, but her name comes up a lot in the blurbs too.

The title story, about a pack of sisters trying to adapt to human ways, is probably my favorite, but I also loved the bleak picture of dreams lost in “Children’s reminiscences of the westward migration” and the flaking and sad swingers extra light event in “Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snow”. A few of these stories doesn’t end quite to my satisfaction, but there isn’t a bad one in the bunch. Highly recommended if you’re into sisters dating ghosts, schemes to steal baby turtles, crazy sheep killers and children forced to relive some of humanity’s great disasters night after night.

One detail that isn’t unimportant: this is a gorgeous book, with a cover that’s both funny and just a little creepy. The kind you’re proud to whip out and read in public. show less

Karen Russell is, I think, a bit too strange for me. She writes really well, but I don't quite know what to think when I read her. I gave up on Swamplandia for that reason. But I picked up this book of short stories, because I loved the title, and I ended up liking most of the stories, though they were sad, all about children who were failed by the adults in their lives. The last story was the titular one, and maybe because I had just been reading about Native American history, and the history of boarding schools, it really touched my heart and raised this book to 4 stars.

Maybe I will try Swamplandia again.

Russell writes the sort of story where often you can’t tell if the characters are anthropomorphized animals or just people with confusing nicknames. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. In the world of St. Lucy’s Homes For Girls Raised By Wolves children sled in the hollowed out carapaces of giant crabs, there is a manual for the re-education of wolf-children and there are far more ghost fish in the ocean than live ones. The world is magical, but ultimately the stories are far from fantasy.

Honestly, each story is tragic in its own very human way. In Haunting Olivia two brothers spend the night (just the most recent of many) searching coastal waters for the ghost of their dead sister. The narrator of From Children’s Reminiscences of show more the Western Migration watches as his father the Minotaur hitches himself to their wagon and allows his body to be ground down, blinded by belief in the paradise that awaits them. For me the saddest and most beautiful was the titular story though. There is beauty and abandon and humor, but ultimately this is an unflinching tale of cultural re-education. You can’t help but read it and think of the Native American children that were taken from their families and raised as Europeans saw fit. Here no malice is intended, indeed, the parents themselves send their children away thinking this will help them in ways they cannot. But the ultimate price is a parent and child that cannot recognize the other.

It’s an excellent collection of stories. I came to think of them as adult bedtime stories as the stories themselves are fairly simple while the subtext is rich, nuanced and tuned to those human desires, fears and weaknesses we all know but prefer not to face. Karen Russell makes it easier to do so. Her stories, while rich and vivid, are told without judgment, regardless of the strength or weakness revealed. They simply are. It reminds me a bit of the Faulkner I read earlier. As a reader you can’t help but react to the negative elements, sometimes horrifyingly so, but Russell never tells the reader how to feel and there is a certain ambivalence in that, especially when the characters most vulnerable seem ignorant of just how effed up things are for them. show less

I picked this up pretty much only because of the name.

So here's the thing, all of these short stories are fantastical and magical and amazing, and almost none of them are finished. They have some things in common - most of them takes place on islands or at least near water - but they all feature very different characters and magic and settings. And, as I said, few a finished.

Now, that's both good and bad. It's bad, because whenever I was really getting into a story it would end, all of a sudden, and I wouldn't ever get to know what happened to the characters. They were all so interesting, I swear, I would read a full-length novel about pretty much every story in this book, which is impressive.

It's good, because it really did make it show more seems like all of these stories were part of a bigger world, that it wasn't just a story but a glimpse into someone's life, someone's world, and that if I just knew where to look I'd be able to find so much more of it. Which, really, is a magic of its own.

So, I think the good part outweighs the bad part, but I still would have like much stories with some sort of ending. I like endings. show less

stories: Ava Wrestles the Alligator / Haunting Olivia / Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers / The Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime / from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration / Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows / The City of Shells / Out to Sea / Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422 / St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

I loved, loved, loved the writing...but didn't much care for the fact that most of the stories just sort of stop. Often I'd become invested in the characters and story, only to come too quickly to the last line and wonder where the rest went. This would be more aptly titled: St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Vignettes. Still, the writing itself is beautiful, and I'd show more certainly read more by this author. show less

While I want to give this book a glowing review for the inventiveness of the stories and my unending enjoyment of them, I was often pulled out of the stories by a disturbing undercurrent of animal abuse. With the exception of the title story, I think every story contained some reference to the mistreatment of animals--from sea turtle hatchlings being bagged up for nefarious purposes to orangutans being kept in a slovenly, cold, exclusively indoor habitat. The worlds Ms.Russell crafted are truly fascinating and a little bit of sadness and cruelty are expected in a literary work, but there were no happy endings in sight for the animal victims of these stories and that fact detracted mightily from my enjoyment of her work.

Flamingular! Imaginative without being precious, well-made without being stiff, and chiseled out of enormous blocks of straight-grained joy, this book is magic. Greatly various, these stories cohere in undertone and, broadly, subject. A significant achievement in the bad-things-happening-to-children genre. Worth it for the cameos.