Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
I am very, very jealous of Karen Russell. She got to study creative writing at Columbia, she made New York Magazine list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty six (and she was twenty-five when this book was published), and she also happens to be really, really talented. I bet she's really cool and her apartment is awesome and she has lots of great shoes. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (can I get that on a tshirt or something?) is a collection of short stories that mo...
Someone recommended this to me a few years back, and I bought it soon thereafter at Borders, with a gift card I'd somehow acquired. I didn't bother to find out anything about the book before I bought it; if I had known it was a book of quirky, fantastical short stories told almost entirely from the point of view of children, I frankly would have stayed far away—that's like a definitive list of things I usually try to avoid in fiction. But Karen Russell has been getting a lot of attention lately,...
Unique stories with unabashed cuteness and quirky characters. I can think of a lot of people who would love these!My favorite stories were Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers, Accident Brief, and the title story."My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.""Sister Josephine tasted like sweat and freckles. She smelled easy to kill."
Karen Russell has captured the mucky, mystical feeling of the Florida swamplands in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a collection of ten short stories told in the first-person by various child narrators. The precociousness of the narrators only enhances the magical feeling of these stories, which feature swamp-dwelling children who wrestle alligators, steal turtles, and sail on crab shells. The titular story tells of werewolf children who are reeducated by nuns to suppress their lupin...
These stories are wonderfully creative, beautifully written, and make me very jealous of Karen Russell in general. So why the low rating? Because almost every single one of the stories ended too soon! I don't mean "ended sooner than I would have liked, and I'm sad that I can't stay with it longer" - well, that's actually true as well. But I mean "ended right as things were getting interesting, leaving everything not just unresolved but in fact disappointing and bewildering, since there was no re...
first of all - greg- i lied to you. i told you that the conch shell story (the city of shells) was my favorite because i felt put on the spot and distracted, and that was the first one i thought of. but my real favorite story is the one on the boated retirement community (out to sea). god - i felt that one in my desiccated old heart-sac.i really enjoyed this collection. the stories all contain wavery bits of the surreal - her style reminds me more of kelly link than george saunders, which compar...
This collection of short stories was quite good. I'm awful at writing reviews for short story collections, mostly because I'm too lazy or forgetful to jot down notes about the individual stories when I finish them, so the entire collection sort of becomes jumbled up in my head. These kind of fall into the George Saunders like style of writing, weird slightly off-kilter distortions of the real world, but unlike some of the George Saunders-esque writers out there is never the feeling that Karen Ru...
3.5/5. My favourite stories were: Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers, Haunting Olivia & St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.
"Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body."actual rating: 2.5I did not like most of the stories in here, but that is about the rawest quote ever. Anyway, really the only stories that I liked were the first one [that unfortunately tricked me into committing to the whole collection] and then the last one [which is the title story]. Both of those were easily 4 star stories but all the others were 2 stars and kind of all over the place. Also I know that the title is just tak...
This book is the third short story collection I have read now and the first one which is by Karen Russell. I would have to say that each of the collections I've read so far have been very vastly different, and this one is probably the most magical realism in tone and imaginative, which sometimes awed me and occasionally lost me.There are 10 stories within this collection and of the 10 I gave 2 of them 5*s, 6 of them 4*s and 2 of them 3*s. I think that averages out o a 4* overall and I am happy t...
On its own, each story in this collection is a treasure, in which children have minotaurs for fathers or hunt for the ghosts of siblings washed to sea in giant clamshell sleds. Russell's distinct voice shines through each piece, and coming across one of these in the magazines where they first appeared would be a genuine treat. Unfortunately, the stories are weakened by being strung together. Russell writes in a distinct voice, but nearly every story is written in that same voice. Each story ends...
