St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Stories

By: Karen Russell

Narrated by: Various

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 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.


List of Readers
Ava Wrestles the Alligator--Arielle Sitrick
Haunting Olivia--Zach McLarty
Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers--Patrick Mackie
The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime--Nick Chamian
from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration--Jesse Bernstein
Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows--J.B. Adkins
The City of Shells--Kathe Mazur
Out To Sea--Arthur Morey
Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422--Kirby Heyborne
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves--Deirdre Lovejoy

Critic reviews

A San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year


“A master of tone and texture and an authority on the bizarre, Karen Russell writes with great flair and fearlessness.” —Carlo Wolff, The Denver Post

“How I wish these were my own words, instead of breakneck demon writer Karen Russell’s, whose stories begin, in prose form, where the jabberwock left off. . . . Run for your life. This girl is on fire.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Karen Russell is a storyteller with a voice like no other. . . . Laced with humor and compassion.” —Lauren Gallo, People

“One of the strangest, creepiest, most surreal collections of tales published in recent memory. . . . Her writing bristles with confidence.” —June Sawyers, San Francisco Chronicle

“Twent-five--year-old wunderkind Karen Russell . . . proves herself a mythologist of the darkest and most disturbing sort. . . . Ten unforgettable, gorgeously imaginative tales.”—Jenny Feldman, Elle

Fun & entertaining stories.....with one complaint.

I'm not quite finished with these stories but feel compelled to comment at this point anyway. So far, so good. I have really enjoyed these, some more than others, but all of them are fun with layers that make you really feel for the main characters. The story "The City of Shells" however fell flat. Probably because the narrator mispronounces a word that is used over and over again. The word "conch", which is a shell so of course it's integral to this story, is mis-pronounced with a soft "ch". In reality it is pronounced "konk". It's a small detail but for a longtime resident of the Florida Keys it's an annoyance to hear it mispronounced repeatedly. When I hear it said wrong by a tourist I forgive them their ignorance. But someone paid to narrate a story should do their homework. That said, I'm sure the few stories I have left won't disappoint. I look forward to hearing them.

Stories are great, readings could be much better

Would you consider the audio edition of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves to be better than the print version?

Kathe Mazur's reading of The City of Shells kills the story. How her pronunciation of conch made it past the people at Penguin Random House, I don't know. The other readers are of varying quality.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of the narrators?

Professionals

Any additional comments?

This sounds like it was narrated by characters haunting the theme park in the book.

Terrible performance

Actors mispronounced words, overacting, at times wincingly bad. The prose, when you could hear it over the acting, saved the book from being impossibly intolerable.

Awkward...

Highly recommended, I want to listen as I had read a review of Swamplandia. The stories were interesting but they end so abruptly that I struggled to get closure with the story.

Unique but uneven

I liked a few of these stories (Ava Wrestles the Alligator, Star Gazer's Guide to Summertime Crime, Accident Brief, and the title story). A few were good except for the endings. A few I pretty much hated.

The author writes well and I loved the quirky, original ideas but some of them weren't executed very well. Many of the stories seemed pretentious or obscure at times. The author also likes to use highbrow words that don't really fit the characters/narrators (who are mostly children).

Overall, I thought the book averaged out to be just OK. There were some high points, some low points, and a lot that was in between. I was pretty glad when I finished the book and I could move on to something else. Each story was read by a different person. Some readers were better than others.