Is The Theme Of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves

Kelli Raque
Ms. Stout
Creative Writing
26 April, 2023 TW
In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell the reader follows a collection of short stories told by many perspectives. From the four that the class read there are many literary devices used, one that really stuck out was how she decided to tell the stories and who told them. Russell uses point of view effectively throughout a lot of her stories, by making the narrator a younger kid telling the story it helps provide to the magical realism in the book and also lets the readers have different interpretations of the story and debate if it's all real magic or just the magic of childhood.
In the short story Haunting Olivia the story is told by a young boy named Timothy

's Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers. The story follows Elijah, a preteen boy who has been sent to this camp to get help for his sleeping disorders. Throughout the story Elijah describes the weird events happening at the camp and how his dreams get weirder as it all happens. Elijah will occasionally write to his mother about the crazy dreams he has while there, “‘Mom, I dreamed that fire was falling from outer space. And the fire was headed straight for these long necked monsters. And oh, Mom, then the whole world was cratered and dark, and there were only the stooped, hairy creatures stealing eggs, and no more monsters. We have to save them!’” (Russell 57). The way Elijah writes shows his immaturity already, the way he interrupts himself even when writing and then when the story that he is writing is really looked at. It is inferred that Elijah is talking about the extinction of dinosaurs but near the end he adds the twist of aliens taking over, because most people are aware of the event it can be assumed that Elijah’s imagination just decides to add some alternative ending in his dreams. Dreams are uncontrollable and completely fueled by the brain, so due the fact that they are out of the dreamers control most of the time this dream of his would be easy to brush off and be explained as a vivid imagination of a young boy. This then adds to skepticism and the question of “How reliable is this narrator?” As the story progresses everything begins to fall apart, “Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world: Oglivy erasing his dream log; Annies blank eyes filling with phantom dogs; Merino’s milky gray belly resurfacing with terrible buoyancy.” (71). By everything happening rto be falling apart at the same time may support the fact that everything Elijah is seeing and talking about is a