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A review by matthewcpeck
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
4.0
The stories in Karen Russell’s debut collection are of a piece. Nearly all of them take place on an unnamed south Florida island, and an ancillary character in one story may be the protagonist in the next. The first four stories alone are all set among adolescent inhabitants of this swampy isle, and always at night.
The typical Russell yarn features an endearingly awkward teen (chubby or hairy or mute, etc.) that’s slipped through the cracks of societal institutions, and a surreal, natural-world adventure – like getting trapped inside of a car-sized conch shell with a janitor during a thunderstorm, or searching for the aquatic ghost of a dead sister in a hidden bay cove festooned with glowworms. These tales are in the tradition stretching from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Haruki Murakami, but above all they have the lingering flavor of Karen Russell’s subconscious. From the descriptions, it sounds like the stories could suffer from forced whimsy and quirk, but no – they work wonderfully because Russell describes the frustrations and euphoria of adolescence with the same matter-of-factness she employs to introduce a dancing albino covered in tin foil or an alpine plane crash. There is one story where this balance doesn’t quite work – the intriguingly titled ‘from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration’ imagines the legendary Minotaur as the harried patriarch of a family of 19th-century settlers, and it never quite gels. On the high end of the spectrum is the title story, saved for last, narrated by one among a group of werewolves’ daughters being eased into human society. It’s flawless – hilarious, unforgettable, haunting.
*A note for fans of ‘Swamplandia!’: the first story in this collection (‘Ava Wrestles The Alligator’) is the seed that grew into the novel, but it has some significant alterations and is worth reading on its own.
The typical Russell yarn features an endearingly awkward teen (chubby or hairy or mute, etc.) that’s slipped through the cracks of societal institutions, and a surreal, natural-world adventure – like getting trapped inside of a car-sized conch shell with a janitor during a thunderstorm, or searching for the aquatic ghost of a dead sister in a hidden bay cove festooned with glowworms. These tales are in the tradition stretching from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Haruki Murakami, but above all they have the lingering flavor of Karen Russell’s subconscious. From the descriptions, it sounds like the stories could suffer from forced whimsy and quirk, but no – they work wonderfully because Russell describes the frustrations and euphoria of adolescence with the same matter-of-factness she employs to introduce a dancing albino covered in tin foil or an alpine plane crash. There is one story where this balance doesn’t quite work – the intriguingly titled ‘from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration’ imagines the legendary Minotaur as the harried patriarch of a family of 19th-century settlers, and it never quite gels. On the high end of the spectrum is the title story, saved for last, narrated by one among a group of werewolves’ daughters being eased into human society. It’s flawless – hilarious, unforgettable, haunting.
*A note for fans of ‘Swamplandia!’: the first story in this collection (‘Ava Wrestles The Alligator’) is the seed that grew into the novel, but it has some significant alterations and is worth reading on its own.