Russell's explosively imaginative stories explore an adolescent hinterland ... Full of a lively sense of the fantastical, the stories also inhabit a beautifully realized natural environment of starlit skies, phosphorescent caves and abundant animal life ... Russell's injection of a sense of the absurd lends an originality and lightness of touch to this creatively acrobatic debut.
...Karen Russell’s stories are unnerving, darkly funny, and immensely enjoyable. Their standard recipe takes a common coming-of-age theme...folds it into a surreal situation...and tops it off with superb, efficient sentences. Mix well and you’ve got one of the strongest debuts in recent memory ... Moving skillfully between the banal and the extraordinary—a dingy dining room one minute, secret underwater caves the next—Russell blurs the boundaries between the real and the surreal until we become hyperaware and suspicious of every detail. It’s an effect that lasts even after you set the book down ... These haunting stories confidently eschew tidy, 'life’s pretty swell after all' resolutions. Instead, Russell concludes them with harrowing abruptness, showing how childhood, for all its supposed freedom and ease, can in fact be painful, dangerous, and rife with near-fatal miscalculations.
Karen Russell's startlingly original collection...features graceful and seductive prose that transports the reader into surreal and yet utterly plausible realms ... In every story, Russell demonstrates a mastery of her craft, an achievement made even more compelling by the fact that she's only 24 years old.
As most of the stories in Karen Russell's madcap yet wistful debut collection attest, the Florida Everglades ooze decay ... [Russell's] theme-park details evoke George Saunders, and her descriptions of lush, decadent flora echo Joy Williams. But Russell's antic sensibility above all recalls cartoons; her imagination is a combustible, pinwheeling thing, and it animates these coming-of-age vignettes with a ferocious absurdity ... These...are strange, lingering tales—yet less for their inventive flourishes than for their ability to capture a kind of discomfiting fear that comes with adulthood; the protagonists are propelled out of the adolescent here-and-now into the world beyond. Both stories are marked by an awareness of the passage of time and the tendency toward betrayal—of oneself and of those one loves.
...her stories, entertaining as they are, still ring hollow. They are so weird and, at times, disturbing, yet the effect is all smoke and mirrors. While one can marvel at Russell's craft and admire her inventiveness (not to mention her wild imagination), the stories, as a whole, can leave you cold and largely unmoved ... The collection also has its charm. The various idiosyncrasies of the characters are often endearing, and it contains plenty of sly humor ...
Russell is a writer to watch, but whether or not one will fully appreciate St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves—clearly it is not for everyone—is a matter of personal taste.
...this is a dazzling debut, but these stories have something quieter and more judged about them than the exuberant fireworks I was expecting ... betrayal and casual childish cruelty are strong themes in these stories, providing a needed cohesion to a collection otherwise overloaded with outlandish settings and plots. Sometimes, it is judged perfectly ... In places, however, I found the cruelty too much[.]
Like the brilliant George Saunders, Russell uses non-realist situations to pursue a realist goal: illumining the human heart ... To be a child, these stories imply, is to be freer of the restraints of human culture, more in touch with the nonhuman world ... Like the underwater worlds that haunt her pages, Russell’s stories fascinate us with a strangeness that feels more familiar with every moment we spend submerged, until we swim in it as readily as we walk on land.
This unusual, haunting collection confirms that the hype is well deserved ... scenes deftly balance mythology and the gleeful absurdity of Monty Python with a darker urgency to acknowledge the ancient, the infinite, and the inadequacies of being human ... Original and astonishing, joyful and unsettling, these are stories that will stay with readers.
This startlingly original set of stories, which feels as though it might have been written by Lemony Snicket and Margaret Atwood, is not to be missed, and author Russell...is poised to become a literary powerhouse.
A series of upbeat, sentimental fables ... Russell has powers of description and mimicry reminiscent of Jonathan Safron Foer...and her macabre fantasies structurally evoke great Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor. If, at 24, Russell hasn't quite found a theme beyond growing up is hard to do (especially if you're a wolf girl), her assorted siblings are rendered with winning flair as they gambol, perilously and charmingly, toward adulthood.
