St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
A San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
These ten extraordinary stories introduce a radiant new talent, as well as a world—the surreal marshes of the Florida Everglades—whose outlandish predicaments magically reveal the truth of our own lives.
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, Insomniacs; Cabin 3, Somnambulists…). In “Out to Sea,” Grampa Sawtooth is shipped off to a gated retirement community comprised of independently floating houseboats in a sea of man-made waves. In “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” the collection’s stunning title story, 15 girls raised by wolves are painstakingly reeducated by nuns.
Praise for St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
“Hallelujah! Karen Russell’s work sweeps the ground from beneath your feet and replaces it with something new and wondrous, part Florida swampland, part holy water. A confident, auspicious, uncomfortable debut.” Gary Shteyngart
“[Karen Russell] merges the satirical spirit of George Saunders with the sophisticated whimsy of recent animated Hollywood film. . . . Russell has powers of description and mimicry reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer . . . and her macabre fantasies structurally evoke great Southern writers like Flannery O’Conner.” Publishers Weekly
“This book is a miracle. Karen Russell is a literary mystic, channeling spectral tales that surge with feeling. A devastatingly beautiful debut by a powerful new writer.”
Ben Marcus
“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
