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St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Karen Russell
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.
Knopf
September 2006
On Sale: September 5, 2006
256 pages
ISBN: 0307263983
EAN: 9780307263988
Hardcover
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Young Adult | Fiction
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 exoskeleton of a giant crab. In “Z.Z.’s Sleepaway Camp
for Disordered Dreamers,” a boy whose dreams foretell
implacable tragedies is sent to a summer camp for troubled
sleepers (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Sleep Apneics;
Cabin 3, Somnambulists . . . ). And “Ava Wrestles the
Alligator” introduces the remarkable Bigtree Wrestling
Dynasty—Grandpa Sawtooth, Chief Bigtree, and twelve-year-old
Ava—proprietors of Swamplandia!, the island’s #1 Gator Theme
Park and Café. Ava is still mourning her mother when her
father disappears, his final words to her the swamp maxim
“Feed the gators, don’t talk to strangers.” Left to look
after seventy incubating alligators and an older sister who
may or may not be having sex with a succubus, Ava meets the
Bird Man, and learns that when you’re a kid it’s often hard
to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill
you if you keep them. Russell’s stories are beautifully written and exuberantly
imagined, but it is the emotional precision behind their
wondrous surfaces that makes them unforgettable. Magically,
from the spiritual wilderness and ghostly swamps of the
Florida Everglades, against a backdrop of ancient lizards
and disconcertingly lush plant life—in an idiom that is as
arrestingly lovely as it is surreal—Karen Russell shows us
who we are and how we live.
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