St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves Chapter Summary

We remedied this by spraying exuberant yellow streams all over the bunks.” (pg 237) Later, they seem excited and curious about their new location. “Everything was new, exciting and interesting. A low granite wall surrounded St Lucy’s, the blue woods. Her marble skin Our diminished pack threw back our heads in a celebratory howl - an exultant and terrible noise, even without a chorus of wolf-brothers in the background. There were holes everywhere!” (pg 238) By the end of Stage One, the pack is startled by by the nuns giving Jeanette her name. This especially startled Mirabella, causing her to run wild. “When our oldest sister saw the nuns approaching, she instinctively bristled. It was an improvised bristle, given her new, human limitations. She took clumps of her scraggly, nut-brown hair and held it straight out from her head.” (pg 239) “The oldest sister howled something awful and in articulable, a distillate of hurt and panic, half-forgotten hunts and eclipsed moons.” (pg 239) “The rest of the pack ran in a loose, uncertain circle, torn between our instinct to help her and our new fear. We sensed some subtler danger afoot, written in a language we didn’t understand.

Mirabella is still how she was in stage two and hasn’t gotten any better. And everyone was afraid she would go back. Unfortunately she did “Mirabella went home”(Russell.9). Mirabella just didn't fit into the human world and had to go back with her family of wolves. So Mirabella was unable to graduate with her sisters and live a human life. Throughout the whole story Mirabella acts like a wolf, all the way from stage one to stage five.

The last half of the book shows the most change in Jeanette’s relationship with her mother. Since the start, Jeanette’s mother has been more concerned with the church and religion than spending time with her daughter. And in this half of the book, it is apparent that she loves the church more than her daughter. When Jeanette finally comes out, and no longer hides the fact that she is a lesbian. Her mother kicks her out, and basically disowns her. That shows the reader that her mother does not love her daughter no matter what. She only loved her when she was doing what she wanted. She wanted Jeanette to be a miniature her, and when she disappointed her, she no longer seemed to love her. However, at the very end of the novel, Jeanette goes back home to see her mother. She is welcomed into her home even though she is still very religious, but they do

Whether one would like to admit it or not, change is a difficult and not to mention uncomfortable experience which we all must endure at one point in our lives. A concept that everyone must understand is that change does not occur immediately, for it happens overtime. It is necessary for time to pass in order for a change to occur, be it days, weeks, months, or even years. The main character, who is also the narrator of “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, realizing that “things felt less foreign in the dark” (Russell 225), knows that she will be subject to change very soon. The author makes it evident to readers that the narrator is in a brand new environment as the story begins. This strange short story about girls raised by

In the excerpt “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell the narrator speaks as a half wolf half human mind set. She discusses the improvements and difficulties of living in captivity after being free and wild their entire lives. There are three (3) main characters, Mirabella (youngest), Claudette who is the middle child of the three (3) sisters, and last but certainly not least, Jeanette. These girls are few of an entire “pack” of half human half wolf. The pack is referred to as a whole throughout the duration of this excerpt. They experience difficulty in the transition of the “wolf-identity” into more of a “human-identity”. This short story exemplifies how the difficulty of change after being exposed to ones “tradition” for so long differs for each “person” wolf or not.

At the early age of 3, she began forgiving her mother for the way she treated her, always neglecting her children. Her mother refers to a saddle as an analogy saying that if falling off the horse, it shouldn’t stop a person from riding horses. Similarly, even if she burned herself from cooking, she shouldn’t stop doing that. As faulty as her mother was, Jeanette's extremely strong mind made her braver and more courageous through the tragedies. Despite the hardships, she walked through life optimistically no matter the circumstance. She forced herself to have complete faith in her parents. When Jeanette’s dad threw her into a pool to teach her to swim, she thought to herself, “I figured he must be right, there was no other way to explain it” (66). Rex put his daughter in a life or death situation. Although she was extremely nervous, her attitude towards the end was incredibly optimistic, forcing herself to believe that her dad was right without doubt. She doesn’t let herself experience pity and depression for being born into a unfortunate family, she hopefully searched for the sliver of light at the end of the dark tunnel. Although Jeanette went through a lot growing up, in the end when her dad is sick and in

From the initial start of story Jeanette choses to recant a memory that displays one of her deepest fears of her early adult life. Jeannette’s mother decided to be unemployed and live homeless, while Jeannette attends Barnard College and lives a more luxurious lifestyle. From the very first sentence, “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster... It had been months since I laid my eyes on Mom, and when she looked, I was overcome with panic that she’d see me and call out my name, and that someone on the way to the same party would spot us together and Mom would introduce herself and my secret would be out” (Walls 3). The

In the beginning of the story Jeannette thinks that her parents can't do wrong and that they know best for her. When Jeanette's mom hides the chocolate from her starving family and responds with “i can’t help it,” (Walls, 174) it shows how jeanette can't get food from her mom and she goes as far as hiding it from them with no purpose of telling them. Her father's alcohol problem also plays a part in her parent's parenting. When the chocolate incident occurred her mother brings up “your father is an alcoholic”(Walls, 174) to take gilt off herself and give a reason to forgive her. Jeanette’s Mom and Dad's increasing selfishness starts to show that their poor choices will be the cause of the family's falling apart.

Both girls obtain their own jobs to make their own money, but their fathers respond negatively towards their independence. When Jeanette works, her father “[slashes their piggybank] apart with a knife and [steals] all the money” (250). When Miranda works, her father is unappreciative and doesn’t understand why she needs a job. In addition, Jeanette's father tells many stories where he is always portrayed as the hero. However, time after time, he isn’t there for his children, and yet he still asks, “Have I ever let you down?” (248). Sadly, Jeanette never has the heart to tell her father that he has indeed let her down, several times. Her father makes many empty promises, like the glass castle for example. Her father told her he would build her a big, beautiful castle made of glass, but Jeannette’s hard work on the foundation ended up becoming a trash pile. Jeanette’s father also came home drunk many nights, where he would “[break] windows and [smash] dishes and furniture...then he’d look around at the mess and at [the] kids standing there.”

This leads to Jeanette getting terribly burned and scared for the rest of her life.

She has more insight to racism when she attended school and the kids began bullying her because of how skinny and unhealthy she is. Another example of racism is when a young African-American named Dinitia also begins bullying her until she sees Jeannette being compassionate to a young African-American boy. Jeannette has a new understanding with sexuality when she experiences different situations. The first example is when she is forcedly kissed and almost raped by Billy Deel, the second when she sees Erma, her father’s mother, sexually molesting Brian, and the final example is when she distracts an older man when her and Rex was at the bar. Another reason that does not happened to her or what she witnessed, but it affects her, is when she finds out that Dinitia is pregnant and is sent to jail when she stabs the person that had gotten her

“In stage 4 1st paragraphs page 248 she scratches and bit Jeannette leg”. She was mad and never tries to listen to them or talk to her sisters. Mirabella never was the one who didn’t do right. Mirabella would always get in trouble and do bad things at the girl’s schools. She would never try to listen to the nuns at the school. She would not pay attention and learn things. The sisters would be the only one trying to get out.

Her family regularly avoided paying rent by moving from place to place, shoplifted items, and generally lived against the society around them. At the beginning of the book, Jeanette is boiling water on the top of the stove. She turned away from the stove only to have her clothes catch fire. Her mother smothers the fire with a blanket and drives Jeannette to the hospital. Six weeks later, her father comes to visit her alone and says that she’s going to be checking out.

Jeanette’s eventual rebellion from her husband and city life can be traced back to this point. This location is where she first shes her father with a prostitute, she first sees adultery and infidelity as a young child in a hotel room with her brother after their father takes them out to dinner with one of the girls from the local brothel, The Green Lantern. Following this dinner rex leaves them in the shared room of a cheap motel so he and the prostitute can have sex. Jeanette does not know what is happening

Mirabella holds onto her wolf qualities, for example on page 240, “she loved to roam the grounds wagging her invisible tale,” Mirabella actions all show her inability to adjust such as ripping “ foamy chunks out of the church pews and replace them with ham bones and girl dander.” (240) While the other girls live up to the nuns expectations such as walking fully bipedal Mirabella “was still looping around all fours.” (241) Mirabella does not have the, as Claudette describes it a “latent instinct.” She continues her wolf like qualities by “gleefully spraying on the gilded statue of St. Lucy, mad scratching at the virulent flies that survived all of their powders and baths.” The girls' begin to dislike and worry about Mirabella. The older sister, Jeanette unlike Mirabella is able to quickly “adjust to the new culture” the nuns describe her as their “little wolf,disguised in sheeps clothing”