St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

This impressive collection of wicked, fantastical fairy-tales has already garnered much praise; at the age of 24, when the book was first published in hardback, author Karen Russell was included in the New York magazine’s “25 under 25 to Watch”. At the heart of Russell’s stories are children who all find themselves in peculiar circumstances. In ‘Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers’ Elijah experiences dreams foretelling merciless catastrophes, while in the collection’s thought-provoking title story, 15 girls raised by wolves are re-humanised for polite society by a group of nuns. Particularly apt for fans of Angela Carter, Russell employs magical realism in buckets and spades. Two young boys set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab, discovering phantom fish and subaqueous grottos, and in ‘Ava Wrestles the Alligator’ a young girl witnesses her older sister’s forays into adulthood with her imaginary ghost lover, Luscious. Written largely in the first-person, with children or early-teens as the storytellers, there is a real freedom and innocence to the author’s surrealistic tales. Russell’s elegant prose may seem a little too mature for such young narrators, but if you can suspend your belief for a moment you will not fail to become completely enchanted by her witty, imaginative fiction. [Rebecca Isherwood]