St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell
This is the first collection of short stories by Russell and, according to a few book reviews I read, far superior to her second collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I have to disagree, I enjoyed Vampires much more than Raised by Wolves. Most of the stories here struck me as vapid and unengaging. Of course, Raised by Wolves is mostly stories about teen and pre-teen kids and I've already made it plain how I feel about that. Most of the stories are set on the off-Florida island where Russell's novel Swamplandia! takes place, and feature many of the same features and some of the same characters (in fact, I believe one story is an except from Swamplandia!).
The stories:
Ava Wrestles the Alligator. There was only a brief mention of alligator wrestling, and Ava's father was doing most of that. Instead the story concerns Ava's relationship with her (possibly mentally deficient) older sister, whose nightly masturbation Ava mistakes for possession by a ghost. It doesn't get any better than that description. This is the likely Swamplandia! excerpt.
Haunting Olivia. One of the stories I almost liked. Two years ago, a pair of young brothers left their little sister alone at the beach, playing in the ocean on some sort of aquatic sled. Naturally enough, she disappeared and the boys have been looking for her body ever since. This is chiefly the complusion of the oldest brother, who feels driven to apologize to her, while the younger brother (the story's narrator) would rather just let the whole thing drop.
Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers. Summer camp for kids who have trouble sleeping. Had a hard time making head or tail of this one, because I lost interest well before the possibly disturbing ending. Like most of Russell's stories that I've read, these have inconclusive endings and this has one of the most inconclusive.
The Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime. Nerd visiting the island on a summer vacation with his astronaut father and twin sister falls in with bad kids. Truly distasteful.
from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration. Family from the Westward-Ho! days travels across the Great Plains with much deprivation. Not as standard a story as it sounds since the father of the family is a minotaur. Meandering but not that bad.
Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows. Two young boys freak out over parental ice skating. There's more to it than that, but it's pretty stupid.
The City of Shells. A young girl, and then the man who tries to help her, get trapped inside a giant, prehistoric conch shell. See remark on story above.
Out to Sea. A retirement home where everyone lives on a boat institutes a program where the elderly residents are visited weekly by teenage felons. Personally, I would have barred my door but the old people in this story become emotionally dependent on their thieving "buddies".
Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422. One of the few stories not set on the Florida island, I'm not sure where this is supposed to be, but the clues are that the locals are a tribe called the Moa, which would make me suspect New Zealand except that the location is surrounded by glaciers. Does New Zealand have glaciers? Anyway, three young boys being transported by plane to the top of one glacier for a singing ceremony (don't ask) crash land on another glacier and who knows what happens to them.
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Like the minotaur in the Westward Migration story, werewolves are real in the world of St. Lucy's Home. The big differences to werewolves we're used to reading about is that the wolf form is the default one, and werewolfism skips a generation with the non-werewolf offspring having a human form but wolf habits. Also, the werewolf parents willingly give their non-wolf children up to the Catholic Church to be raised as human, if possible. This is the story I was looking forward most to reading but I was incapable of giving a damn about a single character, even the one who was marginally interesting -- the 8-yr old wolf girl who wasn't adapting.
Reading next: The Botany of Desire: a plant's eye view of the world, by Michael Pollan. I've already gotten a quarter of the way thru this book, which is the chapter about apples, and learned a few things I'd rather not know about Johnny Appleseed.
The stories:
Ava Wrestles the Alligator. There was only a brief mention of alligator wrestling, and Ava's father was doing most of that. Instead the story concerns Ava's relationship with her (possibly mentally deficient) older sister, whose nightly masturbation Ava mistakes for possession by a ghost. It doesn't get any better than that description. This is the likely Swamplandia! excerpt.
Haunting Olivia. One of the stories I almost liked. Two years ago, a pair of young brothers left their little sister alone at the beach, playing in the ocean on some sort of aquatic sled. Naturally enough, she disappeared and the boys have been looking for her body ever since. This is chiefly the complusion of the oldest brother, who feels driven to apologize to her, while the younger brother (the story's narrator) would rather just let the whole thing drop.
Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers. Summer camp for kids who have trouble sleeping. Had a hard time making head or tail of this one, because I lost interest well before the possibly disturbing ending. Like most of Russell's stories that I've read, these have inconclusive endings and this has one of the most inconclusive.
The Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime. Nerd visiting the island on a summer vacation with his astronaut father and twin sister falls in with bad kids. Truly distasteful.
from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration. Family from the Westward-Ho! days travels across the Great Plains with much deprivation. Not as standard a story as it sounds since the father of the family is a minotaur. Meandering but not that bad.
Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows. Two young boys freak out over parental ice skating. There's more to it than that, but it's pretty stupid.
The City of Shells. A young girl, and then the man who tries to help her, get trapped inside a giant, prehistoric conch shell. See remark on story above.
Out to Sea. A retirement home where everyone lives on a boat institutes a program where the elderly residents are visited weekly by teenage felons. Personally, I would have barred my door but the old people in this story become emotionally dependent on their thieving "buddies".
Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422. One of the few stories not set on the Florida island, I'm not sure where this is supposed to be, but the clues are that the locals are a tribe called the Moa, which would make me suspect New Zealand except that the location is surrounded by glaciers. Does New Zealand have glaciers? Anyway, three young boys being transported by plane to the top of one glacier for a singing ceremony (don't ask) crash land on another glacier and who knows what happens to them.
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Like the minotaur in the Westward Migration story, werewolves are real in the world of St. Lucy's Home. The big differences to werewolves we're used to reading about is that the wolf form is the default one, and werewolfism skips a generation with the non-werewolf offspring having a human form but wolf habits. Also, the werewolf parents willingly give their non-wolf children up to the Catholic Church to be raised as human, if possible. This is the story I was looking forward most to reading but I was incapable of giving a damn about a single character, even the one who was marginally interesting -- the 8-yr old wolf girl who wasn't adapting.
Reading next: The Botany of Desire: a plant's eye view of the world, by Michael Pollan. I've already gotten a quarter of the way thru this book, which is the chapter about apples, and learned a few things I'd rather not know about Johnny Appleseed.