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Book Review: St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell

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If there is a more intriguing title out there than St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, well, I’d love to hear it, but I’d also be surprised by it’s very existence! When I saw the spine of this book in the shop I couldn’t resist picking it up. It’s a collection of short stories, and one of the review quotes on the back cover mentions Angela Carter, who is one of my favourite writers. I took it straight up to the till. It took me a few months to finish, as with all short story books. I started reading it when I was reading a novel that was too large to cart around on the tube and it made a great travel read, as it’s quite slim and easy to slip into.

The stories are not connected but what they do have in common is their magical realist atmosphere and quirky settings. Most of the stories draw on mythological or supernatural ideas and almost all the narrators or protagonists are teenagers, predominantly boys, but there are a few girls, most notably in the title story.

As I’ve written before in other reviews, I have issues with short stories and novels which feel like snapshots of a character’s life rather than complete stories in their own right. I can’t say that I didn’t have issues with the abrupt endings of some of the stories in St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, but Karen Russell’s imagination is so fantastic and her ideas are so interesting that I didn’t mind that much.

My favourite story was the title story, ‘St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves’, which is about a pack of girls, the human children of werewolves, who have been sent by their parents into the care of a group of nuns, who give them new names and try to teach them to behave as humans are supposed to. I also loved  ‘Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers’, about children with both magical and non-magical sleep issues, and ‘from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration’, which is narrated by a boy whose father is a Minotaur.

I won’t say anymore because at least half the fun of reading these stories comes from discovering the details! I would like to read more of Karen Russell’s work, but her novel, Swamplandia! is based on one of the stories that I wasn’t quite as keen on, so I might skip that and go straight to Vampires in the Lemon Grove, her second short story collection.

Book Review: Diary of a Crush: Sealed with a Kiss, by Sarra Manning

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Warning: this book is the third in a series, and will inevitably contain spoilers for the first book, French Kiss and the second, Kiss and Make Up.

So Edie and Dylan are back together again and seem to have achieved some level of stability. There’s no more sneaking around and kissing other people – but there’s a dark spot looming on the horizon. Edie is due to head off to London for university in September while Dylan has to finish his own degree in Manchester. To make the most of the summer, they decide to blow their combined savings and go on the road trip across the USA that they’ve always talked about. Across the ocean, with no friends nearby to help them blow off steam, spending long days with only each other for company, their relationship becomes difficult once again. Will they work past it, or finally break up for real?

The third in the trilogy, Sealed with a Kiss brings another change of tone and atmosphere. Whereas French Kiss featured just-out-of-school Edie playing hard to get with an equally difficult Dylan, and Kiss and Make Up was all about heartbreak, fighting, and lust, Sealed with a Kiss is about adulthood and big decisions. Edie’s patience is put to the test as Dylan finally starts to open up and confront his past. I think this is handled really well, and shows how both characters have developed in the last few years.

In Kiss and Make Up we saw a few of Edie and Dylan’s e-mails to each other, but in Sealed with a Kiss, Edie regularly e-mails Grace, who has taken over guitarist duties in Mellowstar and has a crush of her own. This was originally the set-up for Grace to become the new diarist in the J-17 column, and you can read her diary entries in the e-novella Diary of a Grace, though I’ll warn you that it ends too soon! Sealed with a Kiss also features e-mails between Dylan and Shona, which I loved. I think that their friendship is one of the best in the series, much as I love Poppy and her girl gang.

But it’s not all serious business as Poppy acquires an amusingly odd boyfriend in Jesse, the band perform in front of an audience, and D and Eeeds see the sights of America and enjoy being young and in love. There’s plenty of fun amongst the angst, though I always find it bittersweet as I know the end is nigh.

The spine of my copy of Sealed with a Kiss is still unbroken, and the pages are only slightly warped, whereas my copies of French Kiss and Kiss and Make Up are worn and battered-looking. I haven’t read Sealed with a Kiss that often, compared with the other two books, and I think that my reluctance to reread it comes partly from wanting to avoid the end. Rereading the first two books, there’s always more to come, but although Sealed with a Kiss has probably the most perfect ending that this trilogy could have, it’s still an ending. There are glimpses of Edie and Dylan in Diary of a Grace (or at least there were in the columns!), but Edie never picks up her diarist’s pen again.

However, I know I’ve also avoided rereading it because I read the road trip section too many times in my mid-teens. It was originally a free-gift book, American Dream, and I adored it, despite having missed both previous books and knowing almost nothing about Edie and Dylan’s history. Seriously. I reread it every couple of months and took it on holiday with me a couple of times just so that I wouldn’t be without it.

[I know. Wasn’t there a library in my town? There is a library in my town! It’s great! But back then contemporary teen fiction books were these tiny thin things that you could read six of in an afternoon – not an exaggeration, I did this every third Saturday after my library trip. American Dream was far better than any of them.]

As you might imagine, by the time I got my greedy hands on the Bite edition of the trilogy in 2004, I knew American Dream almost by heart, and despite my love, I was kind of sick of it. So I read Sealed with a Kiss hungrily up until the part where I recognised the entries and then I flicked over the rest! I’ve read it again since but it was quite hard to make myself do it.

What I’m trying to say is that I hope the teens of today love this series as much as I did and read it over and over until they’re nearly sick of it. I then hope they stop and go read something else for a bit before they return, and that they lend their copies to their friends, and buy more copies as presents for their younger cousins! I loved it as a teen, and despite its age and change of format, I think that it stands up well today, as a fun, addictive, fast-paced and romantic trilogy (plus novella). Dylan is still the ultimate book boyfriend, and Edie the coolest fictional girl in the world.

Previously: A Top Ten Tuesday and discussion post about ‘toxic’ boys like Dylan.
Next up: I wrote about how much I wanted to be cool, and how J-17 was a massive influence on me.