St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell is a collection of short stories that has been on my shelf for a while and I finally got around to reading it. I was not disappointed. It was something I think I’d heard about on one of the many book-related sites I follow, plus a friend of mine said it was good when she saw I’d picked it up from the bookstore. I started it on the train one day when I was heading to Philly; I like short stories when I’m on the train or if I’ll be waiting around on someone, because I can usually stop at a good spot instead of being in the middle of a chapter in a section and totally absorbed in what’s going on. I know, I’m weird, but my reader friends tend to think the same way, so I feel vindicated in my weirdness about what I read where.
Anyway, back to the book… If you aren’t a fan of magical realism or surrealism or anything like that, this is not a book for you. Each story is like a weird dream – there are enough realistic elements that make you think it’s real, and then there’s something strange, like a minotaur pulling his family in a covered wagon on the Oregon trail, or a girl stuck in a giant conch, or goggles that help you see ghosts underwater. There’s a camp for insomniacs with a boy who has vivid dreams about past events he wasn’t aware of, a group of children singing to bring down an avalanche, and of course, the titular home for girls born into werewolf families. But it all makes sense within its own context, and it isn’t until you finally surface that you realize, hey, that was a bit odd…
The writing is wonderful. I felt like I was dreaming as I read it – I ceased to be sitting on a train or in Starbucks. I was there, tasting the salt of the ocean, feeling the mud sucking at my heels in the swamp, freezing on the snowy mountain. The one story I had a hard time reading was the one where a girl gets stuck in a giant conch… I’m not super claustrophobic, but I’m not a fan of tight spaces, and feeling trapped gives me some anxiety. This was so well done that I felt like I, too, was trapped in the shell, and I needed to take a breather.
Karen Russell has two other books – another short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and the novel Swamplandia! The first story in this collection features the characters from Swamplandia!, and I’m excited to read it because all I could think when I finished that story was that I wanted – no, needed – to know more about those girls and their family. I’ll be sure to share what I think about these when I read them. For right now, I have a pile of Black History Month-themed books I want to get to… and February is almost over, so we’ll see how that goes.
Lindsey Reads Things 