Review of “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell. Or: A Story Collection Held Together by Vibes and Strong Literary Connections

 

Imagine a literary agent with the power of Zeus and a Rolodex like a nuclear reactor, whispering, “Trust me, it’s genius,” and watching the New York Times nod solemnly while a panel of MFA grads weep gently into their cold brew. That’s how St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves became a bestseller.

Let’s be honest: this book is not so much a short story collection as it is a mystical scrapbook of weird fever dreams curated by someone who once fell asleep during summer camp and woke up in a Sylvia Plath poem. The writing is lush, sure, Karen Russell has a gift for description, if your idea of a gift is someone wrapping a live eel in velvet and calling it a necklace. But plot? Coherence? Payoff? Sweetie, no.

The first story throws you into the swamp, literally, with two girls abandoned in the Everglades, one of whom is apparently having sweaty hallucinations about an imaginary boyfriend. It’s like Where the Crawdads Sing if Kya had access to pharmaceuticals and a subscription to Seventeen. Then we get two boys at a camp for troubled youth, grappling with abandonment in ways that feel both vaguely metaphorical and aggressively pointless. The message? Trauma is confusing. Groundbreaking.

Each tale is dripping with whimsy-soaked dread and animal metaphors, as if Russell wandered through a Lisa Frank nightmare and decided it needed more existential terror. You’ve got werewolf girls getting civilized by nuns, children sailing on crab shells, and families wrestling alligators as a viable career path, all of it painted with thick, humid language that makes you feel like you’re reading a Gabriel García Márquez cover band trapped in the Everglades.

There’s no denying Russell can write. But what we have here is a case of style eating substance for breakfast and asking for dessert. Every story reads like it was created from a game of Mad Libs titled “Florida Gothic with Daddy Issues.” There are glimpses of genuine emotion, but they’re buried beneath the literary equivalent of swamp gas, shiny, strange, and gone in a puff.

And yet, it’s a bestseller. Because in today’s publishing world, you don’t need groundbreaking ideas, you just need enough “quirky darkness” to get blurbed by Elle and enough buzzwords to slide into a university syllabus. Add a title that screams “metaphor in a cardigan” and you’ve got yourself a cult hit.

Verdict:

A collection for people who think magical realism is better when it’s slightly confusing and covered in Spanish moss. Worth reading if you enjoy being lost in lush prose and don’t really care where you’re going or why.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ (one for language, one for atmosphere, one for sheer nerve)

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Because sometimes, all it takes to be “blazingly original” is a swamp, a trauma metaphor, and a really powerful agent.