On the cover:
In these ten glittering stories, debut author Karen Russell takes us to the ghostly and magical swamps of the Florida Everglades. Here wolf-like girls are reformed by nuns, a family makes their living wrestling alligators in a theme park, and little girls sail away on crab shells. Filled with stunning inventiveness and heart, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduces a radiant new writer.
(Information taken from the book page at Randomhouse)
What I thought:
I love short stories and haven’t read any for a while.The title of this collection initially caught my eye in the library but the first time I checked it out I didn’t get around to it and ended up taking it back. Then I heard a couple of people mention it in the same week and so I figured I really should check it out again and actually read it this time!
Russell certainly has a vivid imagination. This collection of stories ranges from crazy to haunting, happy to sad and everything in between. The writing is excellent and the author’s use of language is much more than you would expect from a debut writer. My issue with this collection though, is that the writing is very samey. There really is no distinctive voice for each story, despite the fact that they’re about different characters. The stories are loosely interwoven, as they’re based around a group of inhabitants of the Florida everglades, but that doesn’t mean that they should all blend into one.
There was, however, variation in the themes of the stories and so it kept it interesting. I did find, though, that the stories were pretty much all left hanging with no resolution by the end of each one. Whilst sometimes that can work, I felt like the author just ran out of ideas in places and I thought that it would have been better if she’d made some of the endings less ambiguous. Maybe she did it to make you want to read more, who knows? If that was the case, it worked, but it also left me feeling frustrated.
I did enjoy this, but I think it could have been much more. I am interested to read her novel, Swamplandia, though, as I’ve heard great things about it and it would be interesting to see how it compares.
Source: Library book
Publisher: Chatto and Windus, 2007
Pages: 256
My rating: 3 stars
