Online - September 19, 2006

I Love Lucy’s

“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”

Lately you’ve been reading about crime and punishment (Harry’s godfather locked up for no reason — gasp!) and pride and prejudice (why are they so mean to those hobbits?).

Maybe it’s time to stop hiding your fantasy fetish in a literary jacket.

There’s no shame in Karen Russell’s debut short-story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. In it, the imaginative author introduces a Minotaur father, a glowworm grotto, and an out-to-sea retirement community. Adventures inside a giant conch and tributes to inland pirates are sprinkled with fantastical detail.

The ten stories will transport you to Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers and introduce you to Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows. Devour each tale as voraciously as the alligator consumed the swamp hens. Then marvel that the scribe is only 25 years old.

And way more mature than most of your reading material.

Available online at amazon.com.