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

BookBrowse:

A blazingly original debut collection of short stories

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St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves consists of ten short stories, unconnected except that they are all set in a surreal version of America and are all inhabited by precociously articulate children who (in Russell's words) are "coming alive to certain adult truths but lack the perspective to make sense of them". For example, in "Haunting Olivia" two boys search for their dead sister who floated out to sea on a giant crab shell; in the title story a pack of girls raised by their werewolf parents are educated into polite society; and in "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" Ava is left in charge of her family's theme park, Swamplandia, its seventy alligators and an older sister possessed nightly by a very randy demon (Russell is currently working on a full length novel about Ava and her family, see sidebar).

All in all, an extraordinary, eccentric, imaginative collection of short stories on the general theme of adolescents and the trials of growing up. As always, you don't have to take BookBrowse's word for it - instead, you can read part of a short story at BookBrowse or, if you'd prefer not to be left hanging in mid-story, you can read a complete short story at the New Yorker.

About the Author: 25-year-old Karen Russell is a native of Miami who now lives in New York City. She has been featured in both The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and New York Magazine’s list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-five. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program and is the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award; her fiction has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Granta, Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The New Yorker.


Did you know? The collection's title story was originally going to be "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," but Karen's brother vetoed it on the basis that it sounded like a "Hooked on Phonics" story, so they decided to settle on what would become "St Lucy's Home for Girls Raise by Wolves" as the title story - but first Karen had to decide on a short saint's name (a short name that is, as opposed to a vertically challenged saint). She toyed with St Ulrich (the patron saint of wolves) and St Gertrude, but finally settled on St Lucy - the patron saint of blindness and authors.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in September 2006, and has been updated for the September 2007 edition. Click here to go to this issue.