Short Story Sunday: St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

At first, our pack was all hair and snarl and floor-thumping joy. We forgot the barked cautions of our mothers and fathers, all the promises we'd made to be civilized and lady-like, couth and kempt. We tore through the austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls' starched underwear, smashing light bulbs with our bare fists. Things felt less foreign in the dark. The dim bedroom was windowless and odorless. We remedied this by spraying exuberant yellow streams all over the bunks. We jumped from bunk to bunk, spraying. We nosed each other midair, our bodies buckling in kinetic laughter. The nuns watched us from the corner of the bedroom, their tiny faces pinched with displeasure.

Opening paragraph from "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" by Karen Russell.

Karen Russell writes of roadside America, all those little, run-down attractions that used to dot the highways with desperate billboards trying to catch each tourist's fancy-- Just 100 miles away, 50 miles to....., 10 more miles to......., you've just missed...... A dilapidated alligator farm, a collection of giant seashells, big enough to hide in, a retirement home made up of old houseboats, a skating rink with live orangutans, a summer camp for children with sleep disorders, an orphanage for werewolves's daughters. Even people who don't take the time to stop and see what's there spend a few minutes wondering what kind of people would. Just who runs places like that? What would it be like to grow up there?

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves starts of strong with Ava Wrestles the Alligator and Haunting Olivia, two stories I've reviewed previously. (I put them both on the list of 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die.) Both deal with two siblings--girls in one, boys in the other--on their own for the summer, parents away dealing with problems of loss. The children try to make sense of their worlds and their family's neglect of them in whatever way they can. Their imaginations play such a strong role in their lives that the both stories begin to border on fantasy, the reader begins to wonder what is real in each.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the stories decline in quality. I enjoyed "Z.Z.'z Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers" and "Out to Sea," but the novelty of each story's unusual setting and unusual premise began to wear off well before the last story in the collection. The early stories used their fantastic premises and fanciful plot elements to say something about the human condition. But by the end of the collection what had been insightful seems merely clever. What insight into ourselves can we gain from a story about girls raised by wolves who are trained to function in the human world? We learn that afterwards they are no longer wolves, they cannot ever return to their wolf families. You can't go home again. I expected more of a payoff than that. But the stories in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves that do payoff, payoff well. The fanciful plot elements draw the reader into the childhood worlds Karen Russell explores, worlds that can be as imaginary as they are real. Child's play can take very serious turns in it's attempt to make sense of the adult world.

Karen Russell, at age 24, has received high praise for her collection. She's been featured on National Public Radio, named one of the Best Young American novelists by Granta without actually having published a novel, and has something of a following already. I hope this doesn't end up hurting her writing in the long run. While I'm not recommending anyone buy St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves I am looking forward to more from Karen Russell. What's good in her collection is very good. Unfortunately, success can lead a writer to focus on what succeeded, instead of on what was good.