Karen Russell’s debut collection of stories is an exuberant and imaginative journey into places that seem fantastic, yet could be true.

Beneath the stories’ tricksy titles (Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows; The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime) and their bonkers-sounding enterprises (the Comical Ironical Crime Ring; ZZ’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers) lie moving tales of youth, loss, old age, and the fight against conformity. There is crazy-with-a-capital-K fun here, but also thoughtfulness; if the set-ups verge on the absurd, the characters and situations feel disarmingly real.

Take the title story: in a home run by nuns, young werewolves are trained to be good humans, taught identical manners in five stages. Their feral scent is masked, they have to wear shoes and dresses and learn how to dance. The message is clear –
society’s strictures suppress individuality – but the delivery is wild and witty.

The bumpy ride from childhood to adolescence features in several stories. Young narrators struggle to come to terms with siblings and fractured families rendered unstable by divorce or death. Friendships are made between unlikely pairings as characters are thrown together in unusual circumstances.

Goody-two-shoes Ollie is befriended on his holiday by ne’er-do-well Raffy and dragged into a scheme to bag up baby turtles as they emerge from the sand; Jacob and Clem play ball together on a westward migration trail until Clem’s parents decide that Jacob’s father – a minotaur – has given their son lice (another dig at tolerance here, but some funny jokes as well: Clem’s sisters are called Maisy and Dotes hahaha).

In other stories, an unloved pudgy redheaded girl gets stuck in a giant conch in the City of Shells amusement park; Ava watches out for her sister, who disappears from their father’s ’gator-wrestling theme park (Swamplandia!) for hours at a time, possessed by the rapacious Luscious; and an old man comes to depend on the weekly visits of a thieving teenager.

Russell’s zany plots are reminiscent of stories by Etgar Keret and, in particular, George Saunders, but she writes beautifully as well. A forest at night is ‘full of friendly menace’; characters ‘flinch beneath the leaf-flung shadows’; ‘jolly mosquitoes drone on and on’; conch shells ‘echo with the radular skitterclatter of their extinct inhabitants.’

It is this quality that brings Karen Russell’s stories to life. Musical, uplifting prose renders the absurd reassuringly familiar, palatable and above all believable. St Lucy’s is, to steal Russell’s love of capital letters for a minute, a Sparkling and Confident Wonder.

Review by James Smith, Story website editor

St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is published by Chatto & Windus

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