St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell is a collection of short stories, but not the typical kind. Each story is delirious and detailed, bubbling with peculiar ideas. With one tale following a family’s pilgrimage with their minotaur father, and another — an alligator wrestler whose sister becomes possessed, Russell’s work allows the reader a window into another world entirely.
It is rare to come across a collection of short stories in which believable characters are so perfectly slotted into fantastical situations. And yet, as removed as these characters and their situations are, Russell engages the reader so we still empathise with their lives.
The titular story of the collection, in which werewolf children are taken into care and edu- cated by nuns, is par- ticularly apt in helping describe the effect these stories have. Russell builds a believable reali- ty out of a fantastical sit- uation as she describes the rules and difficulties of the weregirls’ new lives, examining those who find it easy to adapt, and those who do not. The reader can recognise themselves in such tales, and relate it to aspects of our own lives, and in this way the stories can be extremely rewarding.
Those who have little time for fancy will probably be dissatisfied by the macabre whimsy present throughout the book, but even then the writing is taut and leaves the reader hungry for more.
Tabi Joy
Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky is a novel with an incredible history that is almost as stirring as the story it tells. Author Irène Némirovsky fled to Paris to escape the Russian Rev- olution and it was here that she wrote her first novel, ‘David Golder’. However, in 1942, Némirovsky was deported under the regulations of the German occupation to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chambers, be- cause of her Jewish de- scent and despite her conversion to Catholicism.
It wasn’t until fifty years later that her daughter discovered a notebook containing the manuscript of ‘Suite Française’, a novel set in Nazi occupied France from June 1940-July 1941 which her mother had written in the same time period. It became an in- stant international best- seller, having been trans- lated into thirty-eight languages.
The novel is split into two sections; the first telling the story of Parisians fleeing the Nazi invasion of the city whilst the sec- ond describes the inhabitants of a rural French village and how their lives are altered by the occupation. The multitude of characters leading very separate lives continu- ously overlap and illus- trate how differently war can affect people. It is not, however, just a story of conflict and defeat; love, bravery and the sheer desperation to survive mix together to make this novel page-turning. Once you immerse yourself in this tale, it is almost im- possible to drag yourself away.
Sophie Steiger
Nobody does dystopia quite like Margaret Atwood. And nowhere does she do it better than in The Handmaid’s Tale. Her research into the scientific and sociologi- cal issues dealt with in the book is so extensive that the plausibility of events is never in question. Atwood is not wrong in referring to her work as ‘speculative fiction’ rather than ‘science fiction’.
The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a heaving mixture of religious zeal, nuclear war, misogyny and totalitarianism. It follows the story of Offred, a Handmaid whose only purpose is to breed. After America is ravaged by pollution and sexual disease, it becomes Gilead, a re- pressive society with an invisible government, wherein women are the property of the state. Extreme religion is used to wield power over the weak, while ethnic minorities, people with disabilities and homosexuals all vanish.
The novel is a power- ful commentary on the damage that extremism can do, and does not try to claim that Western nations are exempt from such a risk. Though it was written over two decades ago, the message still powerfully resonates today, and the is- sues remain startlingly relevant.
Tabi Joy