St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

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

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.

Jen over at HTV has restarted the book club (which was originally started several years ago but which fizzled out in the last year) and St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is the first of the resurrected club's books.

Unfortunately my local library (and every other library in the area) refused to acknowledge its existence. Thankfully Jen sent me her copy to borrow (I love that the internet has introduced me to some brilliant friends who are willing to send books 400 miles away so I don't miss out).

The first thing that sucked me into this book has to be the cover. I mean, look at it, it's beautiful. How can you resist a book that looks like this? I mean, it's all very well to say that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but one show more that looks like this has a lot to live up to.

And it did.

With books that are being recommended, either through the book club or one of the trees, I try to avoid reading the blurbs or anything about them online. At least until I get to the end of the book, then I check them out to see whether I agree with them. It's probably one of those weird little quirks, but it helps me to avoid forming opinions beforehand.

So it caught me as a bit of a surprise that this was a collection of short stories, I wasn't sure what to expect, so when I saw the list of story titles I realised I'd been expecting an ordinary novel. I'm so glad that it wasn't just one long story. I don't think any of the stories would have benefitted from being longer, they were just long enough to draw you in, get you well and truly into it and then wrap up. You wanted more, but the stories were complete enough... if that makes sense.

I would have loved to have been able to read this all in one sitting. In fact, if I'd started it at the weekend, I would have just sat in bed and refused to move until I was done. Unfortunately I started it on a Tuesday night and then had to stop reading (because it was a work night) and take it to work with me the following day. I caught snippets of it in my breaks and finished it at last in bed that night, so it is a wonderfully quick read.

The one downside to reading it this way is that I had to stop and start a couple of times during a couple of the stories and I would have been better off taking breaks at the end of the stories. They were really intriguing with little links between the stories and these little elements of magic-realism that went completely unexplained, but the stories were complete little units in themselves.

The way it was written reminded me a lot of Kate Atkinson's Not The End Of The World , another book club book which I fell in love with several years ago. There were similar little fantastical elements in it as well as the links between each of the stories. As with that one, I liked to spot the links between them all.

My very favourite story of the bunch was without a doubt Haunting Olivia. The story of two boys whose younger sister drifted out to sea, and who find a scuba mask allowing them to see ghosts underwater, so try to find her. It's quite sad and I just loved the way it was written.

I also liked the title story, St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves. I'd been looking forward to reading it from the start and it didn't disappoint. It follows the girls from were-families who are taken in to a convent and taught to become humans. It was another one with a touch of sadness to it, but there's also a strong sense of humour throughout the whole story and the two balance each other out well.

There were a few which were a little bit weird, like the first one Ava Wrestles The Alligator. But I wouldn't say I disliked them, I think I just needed give myself time to get the swing of the how the book was written. Even the ones which were a bit on the strange side were beautifully written, poignant and had that same humourous streak to them.

I'm definitely going to have to get hold of a copy for myself at some point because it's a lovely book that deserves a reread. I desperately wanted to recommend it to everyone at work, but it's one of those books that I'm hesitant to suggest to others in case they don't love it as much as I do. Then again, writing out a review like this will probably do more for it than my gushing "I'm reading this incredible book, it's weird and amazing and I don't want to put it down" that I came out with to my friends. show less

Every piece in this book is inventive, imaginative and energetic. But not every piece in this book feels like a short story.

The fault is partially that it begins with "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," which has subsequently been expanded into the excellent novel Swamplandia! Because I read Swamplandia! before the story, it felt more like a fragment. That impression cast itself over many, but not all, of the other pieces in the book.

But there is no short changing Russell's imagination. Most of the stories take place in island vacation spots, often featuring attractions that range from the more realistic (alligator wrestling) to the more imaginative (sledding on giant crab shells, a blizzard-filled skating rink, and a set of giant conches show more likened to Easter Island).

A few of the stories feature a combination of mythical and human, like the human daughter of a minotaur who used to work in rodeos and the girls raised by werewolves featured in the title story ("Our pack grew up in a green purgatory. We couldn't keep up with the purebred wolves, but we never stopped crawling. We spoke a slab-tonged pidgin in the cave, inflected with frequent howls. Our parents wanted something better for us; they wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual.")

Nearly all of the stories are told in the first person from the perspective of a child (as many of them boys as girls), generally a coming of age story of a precocious, nearly-feral child. The child often has the run of whatever place is being described, in many cases with distant parents, step parents, or even no parents, but still has not mastered their surroundings.

My three favorites were "Haunting Olivia", "the Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime" and "The City of Shells", although all of them were enjoyable and worthwhile reading. show less

This is a simply-told but visually vibrant collection of coming-of-age stories, enhanced with fantastical elements that mix the confusions of childhood with the confusions of ghost stories, myths, and magic. The stories are all thematically similar -- a young girl or boy must leave their childhood comfort zone to confront a bizarre element of adulthood. But the individual settings of each story are creative and strange, mostly in the realm of magical realism but balanced enough to feel relatable. (Not quite on the over-the-top dream logic level of my favorite short story writer, Kelly Link.)

I thought the strongest story was the titular "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves", in which the all-human children of a werewolf pack are show more taken in to learn how to integrate into society. Maybe it stuck out especially because it's one of the only stories with plot progression that leads to a clear ending. Many of the stories here have emotional arcs moreso than story arcs -- they're like a vivid memory that you know was a turning point in your impression of the world, but you sense that if you explained it to someone else it wouldn't necessarily be clear what the point was. I sometimes prefer a more structured story, but once you get used to this style it becomes easier to accept.

My personal favorite was "From Children's Reminisces of the Westward Migration", in which a young boy and his family travel west seeking a better life, but encounter some prejudice from their fellow travelers towards the boy's father, who is a Minotaur. It's almost natural to imagine a child seeing their father as a mythic figure, pulling the family's wagon with his own strength, so it's interesting to see this idea stretched to its literal limits. The fantastic elements of the stories are all like this -- at face value they're strange, but in the back of your mind they make perfect sense. show less