St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

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St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell (Goodreads Author)

3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 · rating details · 4,184 ratings · 833 reviews

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 exo...more

Hardcover, 246 pages

Published September 5th 2006 by Knopf

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Feb 17, 2011 karen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: littry-fiction, hey-shorty

first of all - greg- i lied to you. i told you that the conch shell story (the city of shells) was my favorite because i felt put on the spot and distracted, and that was the first one i thought of. but my real favorite story is the one on the boated retirement community (out to sea). god - i felt that one in my dessicated old heart-sac.

i really enjoyed this collection. the stories all contain wavery bits of the surreal - her style reminds me more of kelly link than george saunders, which compar...more first of all - greg- i lied to you. i told you that the conch shell story (the city of shells) was my favorite because i felt put on the spot and distracted, and that was the first one i thought of. but my real favorite story is the one on the boated retirement community (out to sea). god - i felt that one in my dessicated old heart-sac.

i really enjoyed this collection. the stories all contain wavery bits of the surreal - her style reminds me more of kelly link than george saunders, which comparison greggers made. there is always something prickly about george saunders - something almost aggressive and mocking. these are more dreamy and even the unpleasant parts feel safe, like waking up could make the problems go away for the characters.

the only story i was not crazy about was the one with the minotaur (from children's reminiscences of the westward migration). in fact, i mentioned this to greg, and he said "man, i am so sick of minotaurs". so - authors take note. greg is over the minotaur.

russell is a very confident writer. she doesn't take the easy way out, but she also doesn't go for the "unexpected" scenes that arrive unsupported by the rest of the story. and she sure does like the word "limn!"

the collection is teasingly connected, like millhauser's enchanted night: all the stories take place in the same island community in the florida everglades, where marvelous and magical things happen: girls take ghost lovers, or have werewolf parents, boys spy on secret adult rituals at the ice skating rink (complete with skating baboons), or have vivid dreams of atrocities of the past. characters will occasionally pop up in other stories, but only in whispers or offhand remarks, just to see if you are paying attention.

she has a real delicacy to her prose, and even when her stories are unresolved, frustratingly so, i don't feel it is because she didn't know how to end it, but that she chose her ambiguity with a shrug and a wink.

i am glad she is the current darling of the young literary scene; i wish her the best and am very excited to see how her new full-length piece compares to this. thumbs up, karen russell, and great name!!(less)

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Oct 13, 2012 Nancy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf-fantasy, short-stories, werewolves, library-books, weird

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is an unusual collection of imaginative, quirky, moving, unsettling, and stylishly written stories featuring troubled children as they learn, grow, and make their way in the world. Their parents are flawed and dealing with their own issues as well, like the minotaur who moves his human family out west for a fresh start. While I enjoyed the majority of stories in this collection, I found they suffered from sameness and repetition, which is why this book...more

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Mar 02, 2012 Shan Jago rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Karen Russell has a brilliant imagination, a dirty mind, and a potty mouth. Dream girl, right? You couldn’t tell by looking at her. She seems so…wholesome. I left her book on the coffee table with her photo facing up and my roomie said: Wuz at? A Jodi fucking Picoult book? Nah man, that’s my girl Karen Russell!

Initially I assumed St. Lucy’s would be more of a kids/YA collection of charming, harmless fables, but I soon found out their charm is brewed from a much grittier magic than I expected. T...more Karen Russell has a brilliant imagination, a dirty mind, and a potty mouth. Dream girl, right? You couldn’t tell by looking at her. She seems so…wholesome. I left her book on the coffee table with her photo facing up and my roomie said: Wuz at? A Jodi fucking Picoult book? Nah man, that’s my girl Karen Russell!

Initially I assumed St. Lucy’s would be more of a kids/YA collection of charming, harmless fables, but I soon found out their charm is brewed from a much grittier magic than I expected. This was made pretty clear on the third page when a character gets phantom banged – “The ghost is moving through her, rolling into her hips, making Ossie do a jerky puppet dance under the blankets”. That isn’t to say these tales are not youthful, whimsical fables - because they are; but they are youthful, whimsical fables populated by dirty, hormonal ragamuffins who always be a-cussin’. S’fucking great. There were times I was actually a bit taken aback that purdy lil’ Russell had such a naughty mouth (‘That’s where I sucked off the chlorine vendor’ for instance), but it actually provides these tales with a nice balance of realism along with the magical that left me encrusted with wonders all the same.

Russell’s phantasmagoric swampland of lost boys and girls is what Neverland may have become after the burden of history had fallen upon them. Or perhaps what Walt Disney may have written if he was resurrected and possessed by the spirits of Poe, Dickinson, and L. Frank Baum. This is a twilit collection of myth-like coming of age tales for oddball children. I’d let my kids read it.

That’s probably the reason I don’t have kids.

If I had to choose a favorite I would probably say ‘from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration’ which begins “My father, the Minotaur, is more obdurate than any man. Sure, it was his decision, to sell the farm and hitch himself to a four-thousand pound prairie schooner, and head out West. But our road forked a long time ago, months before we ever yoked Dad to the wagon.” If that doesn’t say read me…

I had this dream one night after I first started reading this collection in which an old, raggedy lady in a patched dress stood beside a rotted wooden shack with a paintbrush in her hand. She was good-humored and talkative, but I couldn’t absorb her words; I was too mesmerized by the paint glistening on the shack, which after each down stroke of the hag’s brush left a rainbow smear, glittering wet and thick and goopy. When I woke it made me think of Russell, coating our darker, earthly existence with the vibrant and sometimes messy hues of imagination.
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Feb 08, 2011 Greg rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, fiction, girls-girls-girls

This collection of short stories was quite good.

I'm awful at writing reviews for short story collections, mostly because I'm too lazy or forgetful to jot down notes about the individual stories when I finish them, so the entire collection sort of becomes jumbled up in my head. These kind of fall into the George Saunders like style of writing, weird slightly off-kilter distortions of the real world, but unlike some of the George Saunders-esque writers out there is never the feeling that Karen Ru...more This collection of short stories was quite good.

I'm awful at writing reviews for short story collections, mostly because I'm too lazy or forgetful to jot down notes about the individual stories when I finish them, so the entire collection sort of becomes jumbled up in my head. These kind of fall into the George Saunders like style of writing, weird slightly off-kilter distortions of the real world, but unlike some of the George Saunders-esque writers out there is never the feeling that Karen Russell is trying to be weird for weird's sake. I think some of this has to do with her really great use of voice for the characters and the development of the characters. It would seem to me to be really easy when writing stories like this to get all caught up in the strange setting and then just hoping that the setting and plot will make for an interesting story.

In quite a few of the stories she writes really convincingly as a teenage boy, actually so convincingly that about half way through the book I started to assume that most of the first person narrators would be boys, until proven otherwise, this is something that I don't think I normally do with stories written by women. I know that Lit Crit 101 tells you not to, but in this day and age, especially with young writers (damn her for being so much younger than me) first person is usually a giant flag of hey this is sort of me the author airing myself out for you all to see but with enough of an ironical wink and nudge to put a little bit of fictional narrative distance between myself and the story.

Another aspect of the stories I found myself enjoying was the would sometimes border on being perverse or shocking but never actually cross the line. This created a nice creepy undercurrent to some of the stories, which would have been destroyed if she had allowed herself to write more explicitly. This also kind of helped add to the unknown that floats around us as children (since many of the narrators are children), where there are things that you have the feeling are not quite right or 'dirty' but unable to really fill in the pieces (does that make sense to anyone else but me?). Again this is a very good thing, and her being a young writer it's nice to see that she just take the relatively easy way of being shocking because she can.

I'm looking forward to reading her novel, which sounds like it's an expansion on this collections first story.

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Jan 15, 2008 Brandy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2008reads, collections-anthologies, speculative-fiction, adult

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...more

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Jul 30, 2011 Stephen M rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: tears-of-beautiful-laughter, lifes-too-short-for-novels

“The City of Shells closed to the visiting public over an hour ago. Now the boardwalk is deserted. Silent, except for the medleyed roar of the waves and the distant rumble of thunder. Gray, rain-bellied clouds are rolling in. Farther out, the sea is sluicing into night. There’s a hushed, tingly feeling in the air, as if the whole world is holding its breath. Only the silvery gulls dot the horizon. They peck at used condoms and empty Dorito bags with a salt-preened serenity.”

There are some author...more

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Apr 17, 2008 sarah rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Honestly, I just can't read this anymore. There were two stories left, but I had to put it down.

Individually, the stories in this volume are highly creative, heartbreaking and imaginative, but taken as a volume, the sheer similarities between all of the tales made me want to pull my hair out. Russell is obviously very talented, but I'd love to read something that isn't told from an overly precocious child's point of view, that doesn't end in medias res, and that doesn't involve strangely allego...more

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May 19, 2011 Elijah Kinch Spector rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Karen Russell takes a lot of the trends that are popular in literary fiction and uses them right. Her stories are full of funny, hearbreaking, and strangely unique details without usually feeling too quirky for the sake of being quirky, and her stories weave the absurd into the every day in a way that feels right, instead of jarring (except when it's supposed to be jarring, naturally). I think that I would've liked each of these stories even more if I'd read them separately though, as together i...more Karen Russell takes a lot of the trends that are popular in literary fiction and uses them right. Her stories are full of funny, hearbreaking, and strangely unique details without usually feeling too quirky for the sake of being quirky, and her stories weave the absurd into the every day in a way that feels right, instead of jarring (except when it's supposed to be jarring, naturally). I think that I would've liked each of these stories even more if I'd read them separately though, as together in a book they begin to run together (this is often my problem with short story collections).

What I mean when I say they begin to run together, is that Russell -- like most authors -- has her pet themes and ideas, and also her weaknesses, although they don't stand out much. After a certain point, a reader can become a bit burned out on stories about a child with a sibling and a single parent in Florida (I think?) doing something strange with another kid who they're not sure they like in first person present tense. Thankfully, just as that formula was beginning to drag on me, the book sent something completely different my way with "from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration," which was probably my favorite in the collection (and, as a story on its own, would probably get five stars from me, as would some others). The stories are certainly varied enough, in the end, and the shared continuity between many of them helps it feel almost like a novel with certain themes, rather than a group of stories with certain themes, but still there were one or two that I probably would have liked more had I read them all on their own in a magazine. This is, of course, how they were first published, so it isn't really a criticism of the author.

Another thing that pops up when you read enough of these is that very few of them have endings. The first few times, it seems like a deliberate choice, but after awhile it starts feeling less like that and more like a sort of tic or unwillingness to end things -- it doesn't always feel like it's done for a real reason ("City of Shells" may have been the one that bothered me the most, but of course it wouldn't have bothered me if I hadn't liked the story so much). That said, again, I probably wouldn't notice if there weren't a bunch of them back to back. It does make those few that actually have endings stand out all the more.

Still, though, the stories in here are great. So many interesting ideas and beautiful/strange images that (almost) never detract from the characters and their own bizarre thought processes. It really, for me, shows where the lines can blur between "literary" and "genre" fiction, because while nothing, save possibly "... Westward Migration" has any "genre" elements, the attention to detail and ideas, the need to illustrate a whole world that the reader will not know contains a lot of the drawing power here.

On top of that, Russell catches the mindset of a child amazingly well. Every story here is from (or mostly from) the point of view of a younger person (I think the oldest is 15), and the leaps of logic, the intensely raw need to be liked, the importance of unimportant things, and so many other strange bits of childhood are captured perfectly. Captured in the idiosyncratic ways that separate the way a kid looks at, for example, needing to be liked, from the way that I, as an adult, look at desperately wanting to be liked. This provides some really strong emotions throughout the book, but they're always beautifully tempered by the absurd. I'm interested to see how she does at a novel.(less)

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Jun 29, 2007 oriana rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2007, the-new-new-new-new-thing

The only reason this isn't a 5-star is that I hate short stories. Sorry, but I do. It just doesn't make sense to me -- either they're little bits of fluff that are quickly forgotten, or they're involved and interesting, and there is no reason for them to end.

The stories in this book are an example of the latter case. These stories are terrific! Karen Russel has an incredible command of language (she uses the word 'limn' in almost every story), and a fascinating imagination. The stories are haun...more

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Sep 12, 2007 Jenny rated it 5 of 5 stars

Russell has massive amounts of talent, evidenced by these magical tale spun out of the simplest beginnings: an underwater search for a dead sister using ghost-spying goggles, an island attraction of empty giant conch shells that play eerie music when the wind is up, a pack of were-girls given by their parents to nuns for a chance at a better life. All ten short stories weave elements of the real and the bizarre as if it were perfectly normal, and in this brilliant mirror the absurdities of real...more

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Mar 18, 2009 Trin rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-lit, shortstories

Confession time: I think Kelly Link’s and Aimee Bender’s short stories are only okay. Occasionally one of their tales will astound me, but mostly I’m a bit “meh” on them—especially compared to how much many readers I respect love them. (Personally, I prefer Stacey Richter.) So when I say that Karen Russell’s short stories read like Link or Bender rejects, I hope you can see how faint an endorsement that is coming from me. Most of the stories in this collection feature young first person narrator...more

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Nov 19, 2007 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a book of short stories with abrupt and uncertain endings. I don't like short stories. I don't like abrupt and/or uncertain endings. I gave this book five stars. I guess that says something about the quality of Russell's writing.

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May 22, 2013 Troy Blackford rated it 4 of 5 stars

First off, I still really did enjoy this book. But there were some issues with it, and I think the amount of acclaim Karen Russell has received so far makes people nervous to voice them. This is a very evocative, imaginative, colorful, poetic book. I did enjoy it. But many times I wanted to stop reading in frustration.

Almost all of these stories are about kids whose parents run some kind of impossible themed attraction. Or have some kind of insane parents. Almost all of them end in what seems l...more First off, I still really did enjoy this book. But there were some issues with it, and I think the amount of acclaim Karen Russell has received so far makes people nervous to voice them. This is a very evocative, imaginative, colorful, poetic book. I did enjoy it. But many times I wanted to stop reading in frustration.

Almost all of these stories are about kids whose parents run some kind of impossible themed attraction. Or have some kind of insane parents. Almost all of them end in what seems like the middle of a scene, with no sense of resolution or completion. If you are looking for plots, you'll be disappointed. What you get are evocative mindscapes, forays into an imaginative other world. I like that type of story, but until I read this book, I had never read such imaginative fiction by someone with an utter disregard for STORY. Again, these are like zen gardens of oddness, capturing ESSENCES and evoking IMPRESSIONS.

Where I found the whole thing confusing was in the strange mesh of plot and story with non-story. These WOULD be actual stories if they had endings. They came very close!

I think there is an 'Emperor's New Clothes' effect going on here - she has SO much acclaim for her debut, I fear people feel they are 'taking a risk' by saying anything less than glowing about her work. I don't want to sound like a naysayer, as I really did enjoy this. But it has many caveats.

In one extremely nitpicky statement, I will point out that in one story (featuring a child who is interested in astronomy) she says that something was as 'white as the lunar snows of Io.' Anyone who actually knows about the moons of Jupiter will laugh themselves off the toilet at that line. Io is a horribly volcanic moon, with nothing on its surface but magma. The good Ms. Russell must have been thinking of Europa, an ice-enshrouded satellite of the planet Jupiter. This is nitpicky, but I'm curious why this mistake is still in the Kindle edition when it could be so easily updated.

This is an evocative set of -extremely similar- stories. It is good in many ways, like an abstract painting. However, knowing in advance how -every single story will end- as you go into the book became more and more painful to me as I progressed. Becoming attached to the characters in any way became increasingly difficult as I knew they would be whisked away from me before I could make any comprehensible sense of their situation.

The only story with a satisfying ending - that is, that didn't simply stop at what could easily be called a random time, with no goal or point having yet been reached in the story - was the titular tale, placed at the very end of the book. I hope she has learned from that experience, because her voice is, as many have said, extremely confident, and I have no doubt that I would love reading an actual story by this author.

I would also love a book of poems from her.

But I don't know that I wish to make time for another book length writing that can't decide if it is either prose nor poetry, and in its indecision fails to be either.(less)

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Jun 02, 2012 Judith rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 20-under-40-authors

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell may be too much of a good thing to swallow all at once, but each of the 10 wildly imaginative and vivdly written stories in this collection deserves its own reading. From “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” “Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” and “Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows,” to the title story, every tale has its own bizarre setting in a satiric fantasy of an amusement park, resort, camp or school. Each situat...more

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Feb 17, 2011 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

I'm the youngest kid in my family, but sometimes I wish I had a little sister like Scout from "To Kill a Mockingbird". My little sister would be my protege and fall under the auspices my protection. If I had a little sister I would chase off her teenage boy suitors with a baseball bat, I would take her to an ice cream parlor for dates and I would buy her this book. It seems like the sort of book a smart little sister would want to read: hip, cute, quirky, bold, featuring clever use of intertextu...more

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Jun 26, 2010 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: so-glad-i-read

A lot of sharp writing in here, phrases worth underlining and keeping separately in a notebook. And stories rightly worthy of acclaim. Russell creates characters who are just screaming at the world to find their places in it--places that just aren't there, so of course they have to make their own hovels, whether they are in giant shells or on the face of glaciers. Russell is probably one of the best writers about youth that I've read--many of her narrators are young boys, and she deftly avoids s...more

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Mar 01, 2009 Kathy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, reviewed

I was uncertain about it when I started, but I ended up really enjoying this little collection. My favorite piece is the title piece, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves", a wonderfully imaginative story about assimilation and etiquette for pre-pubescent to adolescent wolves as they move into the human world. It's full of some really humorous moments that made me laugh out loud, and instances of awkward growing pains that brought back memories of adolescence.

Most of the pieces are about...more

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Feb 22, 2009 Kim rated it 3 of 5 stars

These stories are wonderfully creative, beautifully written, and make me very jealous of Karen Russell in general. So why the low rating? Because almost every single one of the stories ended too soon! I don't mean "ended sooner than I would have liked, and I'm sad that I can't stay with it longer" - well, that's actually true as well. But I mean "ended right as things were getting interesting, leaving everything not just unresolved but in fact disappointing and bewildering, since there was no re...more

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Nov 11, 2010 Jamie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories

Sometimes I get lonely for a certain place, and once I’ve puzzled out and put my finger on where exactly it is, it’s located on the inside of a book.

(Here, the alligator swamps of Florida, the itchy magic of haunted siblings.)

That’s how I guess it’s okay for me to say, when someone asks where I’ve traveled, or where I want to go, I can get away with answering “everywhere.”

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First read, 01/10: I loved this book. Maybe sometimes the voices were precious and a story ended a pag...more

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Dec 15, 2011 Andrew Neal rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Each story in this book was well written, but they were all exactly the same: main character is a weird kid (except in the case where he is an old man in a rest home and therefore as helpless and childlike as the kids in the other stories) + the kid observes everything in a very clever, mature voice which is absolutely nothing like a child's voice + characters have funny names + family problems + strange setting (giant conch shell theme park/orangutan ice skating arena/retirement community on bo...more

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Oct 03, 2007 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2007, anthologies-and-collections

I'm about half-way through this collection of stories and so far they are hilarious. As offbeat as the title suggests, but very funny.

(added after finishing the book): Well, oddly enough, offbeat kind of wears thin after a while. So that, in the end, I give this collection only 3 stars. The cumulative effect of reading all these stories in a single week is a bit like being trapped in the funhouse - you emerge slightly dazed, and relieved to be back in normal territory. Although these stories wer...more

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Dec 16, 2011 Bill H rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Bill by: Jenny

Odd yet engaging stories, beautifully told. Several people are getting this for Christmas -- don't tell 'em!

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Feb 22, 2009 Aerin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-literature, recommended

I came across this book during a grab-Starbucks-browse-Barnes&Noble getaway from my children. An hour of drifting through the aisles, jotting titles to add to my Paperback Swap wishlist, sipping a hot espresso truffle – heaven.

St. Lucy’s was sitting face-out on the shelf, and for better or for worse, I am drawn to books that I judge by their covers. This one features the illustration of a little girl in a white and red pinafore riding the back of a shaggy brown wolf. The girl’s pudgy pink h...more I came across this book during a grab-Starbucks-browse-Barnes&Noble getaway from my children. An hour of drifting through the aisles, jotting titles to add to my Paperback Swap wishlist, sipping a hot espresso truffle – heaven.

St. Lucy’s was sitting face-out on the shelf, and for better or for worse, I am drawn to books that I judge by their covers. This one features the illustration of a little girl in a white and red pinafore riding the back of a shaggy brown wolf. The girl’s pudgy pink hands pull at her short, unkempt hair. I knew how she felt.

The author of the collection of short stories is the rather beautiful wunderkind Karen Russell, who was 25 years old at the time of printing. I didn’t expect much, but having recently entered a short story contest, I realized how little I knew about crafting a short story. And how I really don't like short stories. With a penitent heart, I took the book home and began to read.

In the ten stories, Russell whisks us away to the darker side of the Florida Everglades and to the plains of the Old West and to an Eskimo ice cap. She lovingly presents characters grotesque and disturbing, who act in grotesque and disturbing ways. Families run theme parks for wrestling alligators or exploiting Giant Conch shells, brothers seek their sister’s ghost in underwater caves, orangutans perform at an ice rink, and, yes, wolf-like girls are reformed by nuns.

These stories may be surreal, but what’s far more astonishing is Russell’s magic with words. Russell unabashedly expects the best of the English language and refuses to settle for less. Her phrasing is orgasmic.

Now the thunder makes the thin window glass ripple like wax paper. Summer rain is still the most comforting sounds I know. I like to pretend that it’s our dead mother’s fingers, drumming on the ceiling above us.

I shadow the spirit manatees, their backs scored with keloid stars from motorboat propellers. I somersault through stingrays. Bonefish flicker around me like mute banshees.

Somewhere, an Avalanche is about to happen without us. Rangi must know this before I do, and the dead bear in eyes comes racing towards us across old snow.

And sometimes, if she sits long enough, it happens. Beneath the hum of her own blood, beneath the hum of the world itself, she thinks she can hear the faint strains of another song. It’s a red spark of sound, just enough to cast acoustic shadows of the older song that she has forgotten.

Words fail me to describe this book. I grasp at adjectives like “satisfying,” “complex,” “ bizarre.” Russell’s book is the reason the word “phantasmagorical” exists. I think about sucking your own blood from a paper cut or pouring salt on a slug. Reading St. Lucy’s is like drinking a glass of thick, perfectly aged red wine and being fully sated in both hunger and thirst.

This is a book writers should read, readers should read, adventurers should read. It’s not for the timid, but neither is it for the fearless. It’s for all of us who are in between.

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Nov 24, 2008 Powells.com rated it 5 of 5 stars

I was thrilled and enamored with the pinprick subtlety of all the goodness chocked into these short stories. I read a few when they first appeared in the New Yorker, and Russell's so good that I didn't immediately catch on that some of her plot elements actually were not to be found on God's green earth (like the gigantic crab shells that a pair of young brothers rent to use as sand dune toboggans, or the slightly Uzbekistani tribe that sings the avalanche down every year). The title story, in p...more

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Oct 24, 2007 Megan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Whimsical, innovative, these magical-florida short stories capture that dreamy-woozy creepy gator feel of a floridian night. 'Florid' is an appropriate description: some of these stories felt overstuffed, with too many ten dollar words to slog through. Although her ambition is obvious, sometimes it got in the way of the story. That SAID, the last story (aka the title track) was darn near perfect. Too specific to be an allegory, it showed rather than told the ways in which we all end up becoming...more

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May 26, 2013 Cleo rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: owned-books

You already know that something not so great is going to happen to Ava and her sister. Karen Russell is the author of Swamplandia! and a new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I'd read and loved Swamplandia!, but I wanted to try this first collection before getting Vampires in the Lemon Grove. At first, I was a bit disappointed by the stories, but as the collection progressed, they got much better. "Ava Wrestles an Alligator" contains the same characters as Swamplandia!, b...more You already know that something not so great is going to happen to Ava and her sister. Karen Russell is the author of Swamplandia! and a new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I'd read and loved Swamplandia!, but I wanted to try this first collection before getting Vampires in the Lemon Grove. At first, I was a bit disappointed by the stories, but as the collection progressed, they got much better. "Ava Wrestles an Alligator" contains the same characters as Swamplandia!, but I didn't like it as much. The story about a sleep-away camp for kids with sleep disorders was really good, and also really disturbing. That's the thing about Karen Russell's stories. They're so good, and so well-written and also so strange and scary. But the weird worlds that she create work so well. Here's the official summary: "In these ten glittering stories, debut author Karen Russell takes us to the ghostly and magical swamps of the Florida Everglades. Here wolf-like girls are reformed by nuns, a family makes their living wrestling alligators in a theme park, and little girls sail away on crab shells. "

I think either these stories sound interesting to you, or they don't. I can definitely see why some don't like Russell's writing, but I can also see why it mesmerizes so many, including me. I didn't love St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves quite as much as Swamplandia!, but it was still really good, and some of the stories were amazing.

There are so many great images that arise from the situations that Russell puts her characters in. For example, in one of her stories, a family is migrating westward. In their old home, they lived next to an asylum. The migration isn't going well, and the mother misses "the predictable madness". I just really liked that turn of phrase. I also forgot to mention that the father of the family is a minotaur.

One criticism that I did have (and that many other reviewers have too) is that most of the stories are really very similar in terms of mood and ambience. There isn't much variety; each story on its own is great, but in a collection, one likes to have a variety of different types of stories. These are all twisted realities, which is of course what Russell excels most at, but I would have liked to see something different. It's not that the stories weren't creative; on the contrary. Each one did have a unique plot, (side note: why don't we see "an" here? Or do we?) but they all gave off the same general aura, if you know what I mean.

While I was reading this, I was thinking (not for the first time) about how an author becomes a "classic" author. There were probably hundreds of failed writers in the 19th century, and only some are remembered. I was also thinking about those giant collections of all of an author's work, and of course, the "complete stories" collections. And my question is this: will Karen Russell ever have a volume of complete short stories. Or will she be forgotten like countless other writers? She's good, that's for sure, but is she good enough? Just something to think about. I find it very fascinating...

Anyway, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is an excellent book of short stories, although I did like Swamplandia! better. I also like the hardcover edition's art (left) much better, but I read the paperback version, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

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May 13, 2013 Andrei Baltakmens rated it 4 of 5 stars

Karen Russell is a significant new author and her work, particularly her short fiction, has generated substantial interest, perhaps because she obviates the distinction between the mimetic and fantastic genres, between speculative and realist fiction, simply by writing as if the distinction did not exist.

And so in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, we encounter insomniac prophets, boys hunting the ghost of their dead sister, titanic spiral shells as fairground exhibits, spirit possessio...more

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May 10, 2013 MissAnnThrope rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, library-book, werewolves, ghosts, shorties

09 May 2013

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a wonderfully written collection of ten short-stories that are so imaginative you can't help but envy Karen Russell's fantastical brain. She has such an exquisite way with words. Her sentences are eloquent without being pompous, and they convey the most vivid imagery. Karen Russell's writing makes you giddy as she transports you to a word-lover's nirvana.

The stories I really loved were "Haunting Olivia", "from Children's Reminiscences of...more 09 May 2013

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a wonderfully written collection of ten short-stories that are so imaginative you can't help but envy Karen Russell's fantastical brain. She has such an exquisite way with words. Her sentences are eloquent without being pompous, and they convey the most vivid imagery. Karen Russell's writing makes you giddy as she transports you to a word-lover's nirvana.

The stories I really loved were "Haunting Olivia", "from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration", and "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves". "Haunting Olivia" has some of the most stunning imagery:
On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze, and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial déjà vu, like I'm watching a dream return to my body. It wings towards me with a slow, avian grace. Its long neck is arced in an S-shaped curve; its lizard body is the size of Granana's carport. Each of its ghost flippers pinwheels colored light. I try to swim out of its path, but the thing's too big to avoid. That Leviathan fin, it shivers right through me. It's a light in my belly, cold and familiar. And I flash back to a snippet from school, a line from a poem or a science book, I can't remember which:
There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
Karen Russell is one smart cookie. Not only can she do brilliant prose, but she does witty humor just as well. This line out of "from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration" amused me to no end:

Apparently, my sisters still haven't mastered the pot and the spatula, that fiery alchemy, whereby "raw" becomes "food."

I wish Karen Russell would write a full-length novel on "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves". I feel like the short story is just the beginning of what could be an amazing book. I just laugh every time I read the title because it reminds me of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in Baby Mama.

The reason this book doesn't get a higher rating is that when you read these stories back to back, they begin to feel repetitive. Each story delves into the awkwardness of adolescence, albeit with some magical elements, but after the third or fourth story the voices begin to blend together. If this weren't a library book and I had the leisure to read the stories over a length of time, I think I may have enjoyed it a lot more. Also, all of the stories come to an abrupt end so that by the end of the book it can feel a bit unsatisfying. I think ambiguous "endings" work much better in novels, but in a collection of short stories it can leave the reader frustrated.

Karen Russell floors me with her creative gift. I am looking forward to reading her other works to see how she can complete a story and give it a proper ending. I will definitely pick up her next book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories, when I can savor each story slowly. (less)

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Mar 31, 2013 Theresa rated it 3 of 5 stars

All of the stories, individually, are very good but as a collection it does nothing for me. Lovely writing, poor curating?

The author's voice is a strength in each individual story, but in a collection where each story allegedly has a different narrator, the sameness of that voice becomes a fault. The fact that the voice is usually intended to be a precocious child, often in first person, but just reads like a precocious twenty-something with a fine arts degree becomes harder to ignore with each...more All of the stories, individually, are very good but as a collection it does nothing for me. Lovely writing, poor curating?

The author's voice is a strength in each individual story, but in a collection where each story allegedly has a different narrator, the sameness of that voice becomes a fault. The fact that the voice is usually intended to be a precocious child, often in first person, but just reads like a precocious twenty-something with a fine arts degree becomes harder to ignore with each successive story.

In most of the stories the point at which they stop is ... well, the fact that I'm referring to it as the stopping point rather than the end should say a lot. They mostly end in media res, and for a lot of them the stopping point appears to have been chosen almost entirely because the author didn't know how to finish, or thought she'd just come up with a cute sentence she'd like to have stick in the reader's mind. Either lazy or affected, either way annoying. A couple have endings (The Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime and St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves both end in a nice spot, and some others finish in places that are unsatisfying but logical).

My favourite is the titular story. My runners-up I loved but for their endings.

The most disappointing for me were the first and second stories in the book. The first because I got really excited to read a story about a creepy ridiculous family living in a creepy ridiculous home/tourist attraction with a collection of creepy man-eating reptiles for pets. Which they wrestle. Yessss. But in the end it was mostly just about the sexuality of very young girls. It wasn't creepy for the same reasons I might have hoped it would be creepy, and I'll be giving Swamplandia! a miss. The second, Haunting Olivia, probably just bugged me because the premise is very similar to a half-remembered much-loved spooky-sad ghost story I read as a child, and since I can't remember the ending of that tale I wanted to know the ending of this one. Like many of the stories in this book it doesn't actually have one.

Having said that, would I recommend someone buy this if they weren't sure? Yes. But I would recommend they read the stories the way they would have if they'd found them in magazines, or multiple author anthologies. Read one then leave it, read some other things, come back a while later to read another story, rinse and repeat. I'm not interested in her novel, but I'll keep my eye out for her second anthology.(less)

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Mar 20, 2013 Kerri rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: clever-collections, favorites, fiction, running-with-the-wolves

All my favorite books, all my favorite stories, somehow--magically, and through well-turned phrases and perfectly imperfect people and places--make the world seem bigger and smaller simultaneously. While reading them I feel bolder and quieter, enraged and content, as if the very fabric of me is being comfortably stretched and pleasantly toned, growing my spirit alongside my vocabulary, my brain busy learning to see some piece of life much clearer, some part of myself much nearer.

I started some o...more

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About Karen Russell

Karen Russell graduated from Columbia University's MFA program in 2006. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope. Her first book of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was published in September 2006. In November 2009, she was named a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree. I...more

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“My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.” — 21 people liked it

“My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses.” — 11 people liked it

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