Book Review of "St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves"

 Stories by Karen Russell

Karen Russell’s haunting debut entitled St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves has already garnered the attention of People Magazine and The New York Post, and with good reason.  Her assorted tales of darkened whimsy grasp the reader and continue to hold them even after the next story’s begun.

 

Consistently inventive and beautifully disturbing, each story shares vague connections with the others while still seeming universes away from the world as we know it.  In the world of Girls Raised by Wolves, teenage girls are seduced by ghostly lovers (Ava Wrestles the Alligator), haunted goggles reveal underwater spirits (Haunting Olivia) and insomniac children go to sleep-away camp with ones who dream about historical disasters (Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers). 

  

As the stories unfurl in the swampy inlets of the Florida Everglades, Russell establishes a thick, dreamy haze that doesn’t lift - even between stories.  An adults-only blizzard-themed skating party comes to an abrupt halt when the children come looking for their parents and accidentally release the skating apes from their cages (Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows).  A little girl is swept out to sea on a giant crab shell (Haunting Olivia).   A retirement community whose residents live in abandoned ships is forced to cultivate strange new relationships with teenage convicts (Out to Sea), and a young girl becomes trapped in a conch shell on a school trip (The City of Shells).

 

Each story is singularly outstanding; together, they form a compendium of modern myths fit for the jaded fairy tale lover in all of us.

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