I absolutely loved Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove short story collection, but was really disappointed in Swamplandia!, so when I saw she had another short story collection, I was so excited to read more of her short works. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves was….not what I was expecting?
Granted, Vampires was published in 2013, and St. Lucy’s is her first collection, published in 2006, so I may just be running into my usual issue of having read an author in reverse. But where a lot of the stories in Vampires felt immensely timeless, most of the stories in St. Lucy’s felt like a product of their time. Again, this could just be the evolution of Russell’s talents. But I was almost distracted the whole time I was reading by the very 2000s themes. There was a very distinct genre feel to early 2000s fiction; all slightly obsessed with physical sexuality, particularly male-gaze sexuality, the push/pull between the body and mind, and grappling with ‘deep’ feelings. Almost 20 years later, I feel like we eat these themes for breakfast, and/or turn them on their head and push them out to sea. I guess I just wanted the stories to dig deeper than they did.
This isn’t to say they weren’t enjoyable. I did like several of them, and it was particularly fun to read about a few of the characters who show up in Swamplandia! It was neat to see the playground of where, five years before her novel was published, she was already thinking about these characters and how they functioned in the world.
Honestly, the most groundbreaking story of the collection was the title piece. St. Lucy’s follows a girl who has literally been raised by werewolves on her journey to becoming ‘human facing.’ It was the kind of writing I expected from Russell, and it did a great job of getting very visceral about how one would physically function moving from a wolf mentality to a human one.
Overall 3 stars.
Bingo Square: Bodies (for the obsession with both physical sexuality, and most of her characters ‘coming-of-age’ in their stories)