St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Analysis

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a magical realism story about a group of girls, whose parents are wolves, being rehabilitated to live like human girls. They are taken to a Catholic school and are taught how to speak and act by nuns. It is about the action in the story but it can be interpreted to be about outcasts. One of the girls, Mirabella, is left out of things and doesn’t fit in, eventually she gets abandoned. This story shows us how an outcast might feel. Karen Russell’s style creates a memorable lesson. In Karen Russell’s short story “St. Lucy’s …” she uses connotative language to create an alive setting or sense of place. An example of this is when she uses, “They unslatted the windows at night so that long fingers of moonlight beckoned us from the woods (230).” to describe the wolf girls wanting the moonlight and the
She is an observant, judgemental, and particularly determined narrator. When she thinks “Different sorts of calculations are required to survive at the home (232).” She reveals how observant she is because she can tell the differences between where she is now and her old home. Additionally she says “Mouth shut, shoes on feet (229).” she repeats this constantly because she is determined to become a human girl. Claudette is a round character due to her changing so much throughout the story.
Russell uses a humorous tone in this short story. An example of this is her use of language such as “trying to strangle a mallard with her rosary beads (234).” This is funny because you would not expect someone to be using their religious prayer beads to strangle something. She also creates a funny tone when she uses “We met our first purebred girls (237).” the reader sees humour because we usually use the word purebred for dogs but the wolves use it for the humans. Her tone is strangely funny and makes the St. Lucy’s school appear as not a terrible place to