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St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories
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St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories
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St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories
Audiobook8 hours

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories

Written by Karen Russell

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

A dazzling debut, a blazingly original voice: the ten stories in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduce a radiant new talent.

In the collection's title story, a pack of girls raised by wolves are painstakingly reeducated by nuns. In "Haunting Olivia," two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab. In "Z.Z.'s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers," a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to a summer camp for troubled sleepers (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Sleep Apneics; Cabin 3, Somnambulists . . . ). And "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" introduces the remarkable Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty-Grandpa Sawtooth, Chief Bigtree, and twelve-year-old Ava-proprietors of Swamplandia!, the island's #1 Gator Theme Park and Café. Ava is still mourning her mother when her father disappears, his final words to her the swamp maxim "Feed the gators, don't talk to strangers." Left to look after seventy incubating alligators and an older sister who may or may not be having sex with a succubus, Ava meets the Bird Man, and learns that when you're a kid it's often hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Russell's stories are beautifully written and exuberantly imagined, but it is the emotional precision behind their wondrous surfaces that makes them unforgettable. Magically, from the spiritual wilderness and ghostly swamps of the Florida Everglades, against a backdrop of ancient lizards and disconcertingly lush plant life-in an idiom that is as arrestingly lovely as it is surreal-Karen Russell shows us who we are and how we live.


List of Readers
Ava Wrestles the Alligator--Arielle Sitrick
Haunting Olivia--Zach McLarty
Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers--Patrick Mackie
The Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime--Nick Chamian
from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration--Jesse Bernstein
Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows--J.B. Adkins
The City of Shells--Kathe Mazur
Out To Sea--Arthur Morey
Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422--Kirby Heyborne
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves--Deirdre Lovejoy
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 18, 2010
ISBN9780307748850
Unavailable
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories

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Reviews for St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Rating: 3.7335026776649745 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This collections of short stories deal with themes of the transition from adolescence to adulthood, loss and grief, and animal nature of humanity.  They are deeply in the magical realism genre as these coming of age stories include fantastical elements. My favorite stories include "Haunting Olivia" about two brothers looking for their lost sister who sailed away on a crab's exoskeleton, "Z.Z.’s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers" where a boy with prophetic dreams goes a camp for children with sleep disorders, "The City of Shells," told from the perspective of an outsider girl who gets trapped in a giant conch shell,  and "From Children's Reminisces of the Westward Migration" which is an ordinary boy's perspective on a pioneer journey when his father is a Minotaur pulling the wagon.  
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This ominous feel to this book left me apprehensive and sqeemish while reading. But making me feel something is important. The threat something terrible about to happen made me feel on edge. some of the language was beautiful. such as blowing out the stars and make a wish. singing the chorus "I loved the stars too fondly to fear the night". Was there a song?The stories became less and less interesting to me. perhaps they were meant to become more mystical more deep but I failed to engage with any of the last four stories. on the whole very creative. from the heart, I would not recommend. this was on the top five list of favorite books the author of the privileged life book...which I enjoyed. I checked out three of the five books and read this one first. debating on the rest.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I adore Karen Russell's writing. Too dark to be whimsical but full of some fun stuff but the endings are much too open to be fairy tales. The endings could be happy or miserable if they're missing. But sometimes it annoys me if the endings aren't there, though I can appreciate that they aren't all happy endings. Some endings here are a little TOO open. (The only problem I've had with Russell's writing in the past has been the ending of Swamplandia! but I'm still convinced it's the retelling of something biblical or mythological that I'm just not aware of... something with an underworld...someone clue me in!) The stories here mostly feature scrappy children in unique situations. But the endings on half these stories is what I have problems with but I'll definitely keep reading Russell's writing. I can think of so many writers like Russell, which is great because I can't get enough: Kelly Link, Julia Elliott, Sharma Shields are just a few favorites.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Imaginative world building, detailed & vivid mapping of human hearts and relationships, fantastic language. Much is metaphorical and left to your interpretation-- and the absurdities are hilarious and somehow familiar. The title story is a must-read! -- but many of the images, situations and characters will live on in me a long while.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The stories are all well written. But they all end sadly and without much resolution. That may or may not bother you.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Loved it! Karen Russell really has an uncanny ability to capture the voice of teenage boys. I love that she's not afraid to have fun with literary fiction --- not something we always see! I can't wait to read her next book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What a fun collection of short stories! I am not the biggest short story fan, but I thought the characters and places Karen Russell writes were fantastic. My favorite story of the bunch was "Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers" - I could read an entire novel about the camp and the campers.
    My only complaint with the book is precisely the reason I don't usually read short stories: every time they ended, I felt like it just wasn't enough. Sometimes I just wanted another paragraph, other times I wanted a few more pages. While the writing was wonderful, a few left me on the edge of my seat with no way down. I would, however, recommend this collection and I look forward to reading more from Karen Russell!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book was original, and funny and poignant and great. The stories were like nothing I've ever read in their (sort of) magical realism. I usually don't make a point of reading short stories, but this was our September pick for book club, and I couldn't put it down. I woke up an hour early this morning so I could make sure I finished it for the meeting tonight.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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 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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Let me say straight out that I love Karen Russell’s use of language and her knack for creating these magical tales. St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is full of inventive and fun stories. Whether her characters are wrestling alligators or navigating giant conch shells or awkwardly watching women in Yeti costumes skate on ice with orangutans, it is easy to enjoy the imaginative images and play.Initially, I loved this collection, but the further along I got into it, the more it became a chore to read. Yes, it’s whimsical and entertaining, but strip that away and there’s not much left. Most of the characters lack depth. The stories largely center around a similar moment of epiphany for our protagonists. And is it just me, but are most of these stories really about sex? (and if not, what does that say about me?) Frankly, I grew tired of the formula.So I’d definitely read Karen Russell’s work again, but maybe something with a larger scope. I could’ve liked these stories had they been developed more, but as they stand, I thought they were just okay.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The goods: strong metaphors, great stories, strong characterization

    The bads: strong metaphors, great stories , strong characterization

    You will either love her or hate her. In today's world of quick-and-easy fiction vs. things-you-have-think-about fiction, she falls somewhere in the middle, but closer to things-you-have-to-think-about.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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 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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The stories don't have endings, and only a few of the not-endings were done well. The rest just seem unfinished.
    The title story is fantastic, but I don't care for many of the rest.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A completely weird and wonderful collection of stories. A fantastic precursor to the brilliant Swaplandia! Russell's spare prose dredges up the most surreal and gritty parts of the imagination then brings them into an achingly real focus. Ghost lovers, ice skating orangutans, lycanthropic children turned debutantes, children and adults all lost in their own sorrows, failures, and remembrances. These characters for all their strangeness could be your neighbors, your friends, your family, or even you, all blown out of proportion until only the oddest and most startling qualities remain.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Loved this book. It's a gem. I try to convince all of my teacher friends to integrate these stories into their syllabi. Although it doesn't take much convincing because these stories are so rich. They manage to be both heartbreaking and hilarious.

    Russell has a very strong and unique voice that you can't help but admire. While her stories are based in a surreal world, her storytelling is so smooth and the characters so much like ourselves that you can't help but go along with it. Be warned, this is the kind of surrealism that will occasionally kick you in the gut. Russell's world seems significantly distanced from the real, but her prose are so strong that you'll be swept up in the new worlds she creates. That is, until she slyly turns the mirror back on you, your world, and the humanity you share it with.

    Give her a try and allow yourself to buy into her world for a bit. I promise you--it's worth it. Start with the title story or "Out to Sea." My other favorites are "The City of Shells" and "the Star Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime."

    "The Star Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime" would pair well with Sherman Alexie's often-challenged, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. And "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" works well with William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ava Wrestles the Alligator - First their mother died. Then their father left. Now only Ava and her big sister remain on the alligator farm. Well, technically, it's Ava, her sister, and a series of her sister's ghost boyfriends. Ava want to continue with the wrestling shows for tourists, but her sister is obsessed with her dead boyfriends and is talking about eloping. This story would later be expanded into the novel Swamplandia.Haunting Olivia - Two brothers are on a mission to find their missing sister's ghost. Two years ago, she vanished after her small raft was pulled out to sea by a strong current. Now they have devoted their summer to looking for her ghost among the old sea-side haunts. With the help of a pair of demonic goggles, whose pink, floral lenses allow them to sea the ghosts of sea creatures, they hope to spot her at last.Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers - At an unusual summer camp a group of friends with sleep disorders find their typically peaceful experience interrupted by the mysterious murder of the camp's counting sheep. Three friends decide to get to the bottom of this tragedy.The Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime - A nerd and his bully team up over the summer with a couple of extra people to do minor crime. They're rap sheet is expansive, but their ultimate heist is to steal baby sea turtles by shining bright lights at them. The light will lure them away from the ocean and into their bag.From Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration - A young boy recounts his experiences traveling westward with his family in a covered wagon. From the beginning of the journey he feels isolated because his father is a Minotaur. This obvious difference leads to a number of problems with the other families.Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows - A couple of friends make trouble at a winterland theme park. The City of Shells - An unpopular girl get stuck in a giant conch shell on a school field trip. At first she's just hiding to be alone, but then she can't get out. As night falls she is discovered by a janitor, but in an attempt to free her, he get stuck too. The pair must remain in the shell all night and hope someone will eventually come looking for them.Out to Sea - An eccentric retirement community finds themselves involved in a community service project in which young felons spend time with the elderly. The protagonist is an amputee who at first is dismayed to find his habits upset by a foul-mouthed young girl. But quickly he comes to crave their time together. He doesn't even mind that she's stealing his prescription medication.Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/442 - During a traditional ceremony to set off an avalanche, a plane full of young boys crashes onto a glacier. Tak, though he has often doubted the validity of the ceremony discovers that there is some truth to it when he stumbles upon an ancient treasure.St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves - The human children of werewolves are brought to a special school for rehabilitation. They've lived all their lives up until now in the pack, but now they must learn to wear clothes, speak, and master the art of hunting in the human world.A charming and creative collection of short stories about children on their own in dangerous and surreal worlds. These stories are about a time in life when we are uniquely constrained and uniquely free. It will awaken nostalgia in every heart.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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 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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I went outside of my normal genres for this book. If you haven't already gathered this from the 5 stars I gave the book, I'm very glad I did. The only way I can think of to adequately describe these stories without spoiling them is with an analogy. Each of them was like a kalamata olive: small, flavorful, a little bitter (but in a good way), and delicious.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's always hard to generalise about a collection of short stories. I loved a few of them - mainly those that had fewer fantasy elements (The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime, Out to Sea, The City of Shells). These conveyed loneliness in a moving way. They also showed in different ways how people can be cruel or enable others to be so in order to belong to something.

    Most were in a child's voice, and lacked resolution. This made the whole collection feel a bit aimless to me.

    Finally and trivially, as someone from New Zealand, we don't have graham crackers and I didn't know what moon pies were (Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422). Finding that sort of detail wrong annoys me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    On its own, each story in this collection is a treasure, in which children have minotaurs for fathers or hunt for the ghosts of siblings washed to sea in giant clamshell sleds. Russell's distinct voice shines through each piece, and coming across one of these in the magazines where they first appeared would be a genuine treat.

    Unfortunately, the stories are weakened by being strung together. Russell writes in a distinct voice, but nearly every story is written in that same voice. Each story ends in the middle; there is no piece in the collection that has a resolution to it; the reader is always left hanging as to how a situation turns out, what the next part of the conversation is, what happens come morning. When reading just one story, these ambiguous endings can be powerful (and indeed they do, at first), but when taken together, they just feel unfinished.

    The writing is very good (Russell's vocabulary is impressive) and the ideas are strong. I'd be surprised if St. Lucy's Home doesn't garner comparisons to Magic for Beginners, as they're both collections of magic realism/fantastic short stories written by women, but the tone isn't similar at all. Where Kelly Link's writing is loose, flowing, casual, Russell's is tightly written and controlled. As a collection, I'd have liked to see more variety in style and tone, but these flaws won't keep me from waiting for her next anthology.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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 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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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 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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Karen Russell is very talented. Her stories are very creative and her writing is engaging. Being 25 at the time of this collection being published, I am glad that she deals with children and not people older than her. As mentioned by another reviewer her stories do not end well. They just stop and if there is a point she is trying to make, then I don't get it. Except maybe she was already thinking about her novel that explores some familiar ground that is in this collection. Her style and subject matter are not in the area that I enjoy the most. However, she has such potential that I look forward to her expanding her subject matter as she gets older and more experienced.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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 reading experience. 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 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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Karen Russell's debut collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, is a fascinating trip into tales where, believe it or not, the twisted realities seem to surpass even the creations of wild, young imaginations.There is something captivating (slash haunting?) about childhood -- a belief, real or imagined, that things were simpler... or at least that we were all less aware of the complications lurking around us. This is, of course, a construct of adulthood as we give our younger selves less credit, because children are startlingly observant. The children in Russell's stories are very clearly not unaware -- they see everything and know things are wrong even if they cannot put names or motives to the adult betrayals and issues. Their stories may all possess elements of magical realism, but it's the very true, wounded emotions that infuse the page which make them live and breathe. The stories themselves are not connected to each other, but they share a general sense of magical realism that imbues the Floridian swamplands. The title story, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," is perhaps the most unforgettable of the group -- children raised by their werewolf parents are willingly handed off to the nuns so they might have a chance at shaking off their lupine upbringing, as they themselves will never experience the magical change. In "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," a girl watches her potentially possessed sister experience a sexual awakening, fending for herself and a little too unaware of the danger that comes from outside a person, rather than within, even when it's not in alligator skin. Other stories feature theme parks made up of giant conch shells, an assisted living center where the elderly inhabitants occupy boats instead of apartments, and a disillusioned young star-gazer struggles to hold on to a sense of wonder in the world while slipping in to the grasp of peer pressure. While the settings and actual events may be strange and incredible, it's really the description of emotional states and changes that indelibly remain in the reader's mind. (Well, okay, the odd details stick around, too.)Fans of Kelly Link will find a kindred spirit here, though Karen Russell narrows her focus on the Everglades and its environs. Her tone is quite perfect for the short story format, as she offers a concise and single glimpse at each settling that feels whole in its existence, even if one itches to know more. This is a collection that should not be missed if you enjoy short stories, twisted backwoodsy settings, or alligators in most any format.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Magical realism at its best-- where it is part of the story, not the story itself. These stories are well-written and, as both a writer and an avid reader, a pleasure to read and to experience. My only complaints are the order of the stories in the collection and the sort of inexperienced repetitiveness you find in first collections.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent imagery and fantastic little tales. I really like how the stories bring you in to these strange little worlds and have endings that keep you thinking. Great book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A new writer can pull things off in a short story that would be dismissed as too bizarre in a longer work, and Karen Russell is well aware of this. The stories in her collection range from mildly unusual to absurd, but each one is crafted with skill. The volume begins and ends on a high note (the weaker stories are in the middle) and the title story created a world that I desperately want to see more of.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    All of the stories in this collection are memorable. The evocative writing matches the crazily imaginative premises and events perfectly, fleshing out characters I think will haunt me for some time. Russell uses children characters as a vehicle for issues and unresolved feelings we still experience as adults, as well evidenced in "Out to Sea," in which the main character is a retired man instead of the inscrutable girl he's matched up with in a public service program. I very much appreciate the new worlds Russell opens up for us. I didn't give it all five stars because of the way the stories ended. Each time, it seemed, just as things were coming to a real head, the narration suddenly dropped off. This is a useful technique when describing uncertain and unresolved experiences, but it became too predictable when it appeared in story after story. A writer as talented as Russell shouldn't have to resort to the same kind of ending absolutely every time. That said, I hope to read more by her even if the endings aren't different!