Karen Russell’s story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girl’s Raised by Wolves is, as the title implies, filled with stories imbued with the fantastic. Each story draws upon myth and mystery, but in a way that aims to lay bare very human obsessions. There is a girl tracking her possessed sister through a swamp, a young boy traveling Westward in a wagon train whose father happens to be a minotaur, a boy who sings down an avalanche as part of an ancient tribal ritual, and the lead story about a group of young girls whose parents are werewolves and who are sent for rehabilitation to St. Lucy’s.

The stories resemble Marquez and the Latin American “Magical Realists.” Think “A Very Old Man with Enourmous Wings.” But unlike Marquez, Russell’s choice of words is more simple, straightforward, more realist than magical. Her characters often tell us their stories in the first person, and they do so with an ease that takes for granted we will believe them. We do believe them. They are honest, and we feel with them and for them.

None of these stories ends completely. No, Russell leads us along, and then leaves us on the precipice, wondering what will happen. This is not to say that the stories in badly, but rather that they simply end without full resolution or with a resolution that is less than happy. For all the mythos this is not fairytale that Russell is writing.

Russell is a youngish woman of twenty -seven, a representative of that NYC school of writers, but there is something more universal and touching in her stories than I usually see coming from the Columbia MFAer’s. I look forward to reading more.