St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Summary

“St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves” is a short story written by Karen Russell. This story is about a pack of children going to St. Lucy’s home, where they need to adapt and get past the lycanthropic culture shock to become a citizen of the human society. In the story Claudette, the main character, has been fully conformed to the human ways of life. This is true because in the text there are many implications of her being fully conformed to the human world. While Claudette does conform to the foreign aspects of St. Lucy’s home, she has many struggles along the way. For example, at the beginning she “clamped down on her ankle, straining to close my jaws around the woolly XXL sock.”(Page 226). With this quote a conclusion can be made that she shows her wolf reactions taking over her at

Another prime example of this is “Ohhkaaythankyou,” I said. (It took me a long time to say anything; first I had to translate it in my head from the Wolf.)”(Page 234). By this a conclusion can be made that about halfway through her stay she still has not become fully bilingual. She will even start to lose her wolf language, which will causes her to struggle when she is transferring between the wolf and human society. She also struggles which things such as keeping her shoes on her feet as seen here “ Mouth shut—shoes on feet! Mouth shut—shoes on feet! “Mouthshutmouthshut.”(Page 238). This shows primitive instinct showing while she is trying to stay kempt. She does this many times in her transformation period between the human ways and her origins because she is trying to shove out her old primitive ways. While she did struggle during her transformation, she also had many accomplishments. First off she learned very quickly how to bipedal which is modern day human walking, this happens in this quote “Almost everybody was fully bipedal.”(Page 230). She started to bi pedal very quickly which helped her keep up and look normal