St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Ava’s older sister, and the daughter of Chief Bigtree, Ossie is a teenager who believes she is a gifted medium. Because of her gift, she never has to help maintain the park. As a result, much of the responsibility falls to Ava, a preteen, especially when the girls’ father is away. The spirits of men, which Ossie refers to as her boyfriends, frequently possess her. The most prominent among these is Luscious. Near the end of the story, she tries to elope with Luscious, forcing Ava to save her from death.

Timothy is the protagonist and narrator of “Haunting Olivia.” He and his older brother, Wallow, go on a quest to try to find the spirit of their sister, who remains lost at sea. He agrees to this quest only reluctantly, preferring not to think about what happened to Olivia after her disappearance. He has nightmares about a hand rising from the sea to knock her from her crab boat. Unlike Wallow, Timothy tries to deny taking responsibility for her death.

He is also the one of the brothers for whom the diabolical goggles work in the open ocean, allowing him to see the ghosts of dead undersea creatures. This is a dubious gift that he frequently wishes he did not have.

By the end of the story, Timothy finally seems to accept that they will never know what happened to his sister, thinking to himself that “Olivia could be everywhere” (48).  

Timothy’s elder brother, Wallow feels responsible for Olivia’s death. Wallow remembers “my own hands, you know? Pushing her down that hill” in her sled, since the boys were the last to see her and left her alone (39). He pushes Timothy to go on a search for her and the glowworm cave. He wants to find his sister in order to apologize to her for his role in her disappearance.

The narrator and protagonist of “Z. Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers” is Elijah, a boy who suffers from a sleep disorder that causes him to dream of horrific historical events as if he were actually there. His best friend Ogli has the exact same disorder, causing them to experience identical nightmares every night. They are both campers at Z. Z.’s Sleepaway Camp along with Emma, on whom Elijah has a crush.

Elijah wishes to fall asleep with Emma, believing that this will be a profound shared experience. However, they fail to do this each time they try. At the end of the story, Elijah also feels abandoned by Ogli, who admits that his sleep disorder has virtually cured itself such that he no longer remembers his nightmares about the past. Elijah resents this, realizing that he will be dreaming alone for the rest of his life, something he dreads. The only thing worse, in his mind, is dreaming alone only about one’s own past—the usual way of dreaming.

The narrator and protagonist of “The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime” is Oliver White, a Junior Astronomer and generally nerdy boy who gets swept into a life of petty crime by the school bully, Raffy. Ollie enjoys astronomy—which his father and twin sister encourage—but falls for the idea that he could enter a new life as one of Raffy’s friends. He desperately wants to claim his individuality, but finds himself bending more and more to Raffy’s will, in addition to hiding his passion for science from his new “friends.”

He spends a week committing small crimes, like stealing mints from the handbags of older ladies on the beach. Although he is against some of these things, Ollie does not speak up—even when Raffy suggests they sexually assault Marta, another member of their group.

Their main crime is to lure hundreds of baby sea turtles into a burlap sack once they hatch. They spend a week waiting for them and when they finally hatch, the plan works. However, the group realizes they have no idea what to do with the turtles and do not even know why they are committing this crime. Ollie tries to make sense of this new direction his life has taken and realizes that “when I was out here alone with my planisphere, this was all still a navigable darkness” (101).

In a sense, his association with Raffy did allow him to grow up and distinguish himself from his family, but not in the way Ollie intended.

Raffy is a bully who goes to school with Ollie and who leads the Comical Ironical Crime Ring, which soon becomes neither comical nor ironical. He is the mastermind behind all of their crimes, including the theft of the sea turtles. Sometime later, he gets a job at The City of Shells attraction.

Jacob is the narrator of “from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration” and is the son of the Minotaur, Asterion. Jacob, who is a child on the cusp of maturity, details his father’s dream to move his family out West, toward the promise of a better life and green pastures.

Throughout the story, Jacob looks up to his stubborn father and wishes to follow in his footsteps, proving to himself and others that he is his father’s son. He fiercely defends his father when the others in the group begin spreading rumors about him giving the children lice.

Like many other characters in other stories, he also wishes to grow up, so that he can join the men of the wagon train in their activities. However, he cannot truly understand his father’s motives, admitting at the end that he had “no idea what my father saw out there, or what he wanted me to see” (130).

Asterion is Jacob’s Minotaur father. He formerly worked in rodeos and then switched to farming. Reading about the promise of green pastures to the West, he becomes obsessed with the idea of moving his family across the country. Despite his mythic reputation, he usually defers to the human men on the Trail—even allowing them to tie a silver bell around his neck at one point so they always know where he is.

Asterion’s wife and Jacob’s mother, Velina is a human woman who at first believes in her husband’s dream to go West. However, she quickly realizes that the Trail is only causing them misery. She attempts to leave her husband and return east with her children at one point, but her plan ends when Asterion discovers them.

Reggie is the protagonist and narrator of “Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows.” Like many other characters, he is a preteen who wishes to understand the adult world and so sneaks into the adult-only event called the Blizzard at the local ice rink. The plan is truly his friend Badger’s, but Reg goes along with the scheme.

Inside, they witness a frantic scene with sexual overtones in which the adults skate through an artificial blizzard that is so thick it obscures their identities. Badger’s mission is to find out why his father goes there instead of taking care of his ill mother, but Reg is more interested in the scene for its own sake—until he imagines his own father might be among the adults.

In joining the skaters, Reg realizes there is “a terrible pleasure to this, getting pelted and bruised, pelting and bruising in circles” (149). His getting knocked down indicates he is not yet ready to fully step into adulthood.

Badger is Reg’s friend in “Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows.” It is his idea to sneak into the rink to watch the Blizzard. He seems to have a contentious relationship with his father and wishes to discover why he is disloyal to Badger’s mother. In the end, he nearly runs his father down with a Zamboni before swerving at the last minute.

By the end, both he and Badger seem to realize that the mysterious adulthood secret is just a confused, frantic roil that releases the animal instincts of the grownups. Like many other characters, they have reached into adulthood only to find that it is dark, has no answers, and is nothing like they imagined.

Big Red is one of the main protagonists of “The City of Shells,” one of the only stories not written from a first-person perspective. Big Red is a fifth-grade outcast with an unhappy home life who is both confused by and attracted to her friend Laramie’s tales of her sexual exploits. She enjoys small, tightly enclosed spaces where she imagines that she can hear primordial music. She is also dealing with some past trauma, which give her “that unshucked, unsafe feeling. It was with her all the time now” (176). In trying to find small spaces and connect with the cosmos, she is trying to give herself stability and control.

Barnaby is unhappy in his job and has abandoned his former dream of being a forest ranger. He seems not to have friends and is at first simply annoyed to find Big Red stuck in the shell. However, as they go through the experience of being trapped together, he develops paternal feelings for her. Realizing she has no one who will be looking for her, he “feels a rush of love for his pudgy shell mate” and fantasizes about adopting her (174). Both he and Big Red remain trapped in literal and metaphorical shells.

Sawtooth is the main character of the story “Out to Sea,” and he is also briefly mentioned in “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” as he is Ava and Ossie’s grandfather. He lives in a retirement community made up of refurbished boats. Though he styles himself as a grumpy, one-legged former alligator wrestler, he actually finds life in the retirement community incredibly quiet and lonely.

In the end, when Augie discovers that Sawtooth knows about her theft, Sawtooth tries desperately to get Augie to stay. However, Augie laughs when Sawtooth tells her that he loves her, and she leaves. Sawtooth ends the story all alone again, but still clinging to the desperate hope that she will return to him.

Notably, Sawtooth is the only protagonist who is not a teen or preteen on the cusp of adulthood. 

Tek is the protagonist and narrator of “Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422.” He is a member of the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir, although he fervently wishes for his voice to break so that he no longer has to participate. He dislikes his stepfather, Mr. Oamaru, and misses his biological father although he barely remembers him.

Tek resents his family and his life and wants to grow up so that he can make his own choices. However, when he finally finds himself on his own with Rangi on the glacier, he wants nothing more than to be back in that old life. He also finds the fabled pirate’s treasure that the choir sings about every year but realizes that it is worthless—he would rather have his family and his life in the choir back.

The experience of the plane crash and the horror of realizing that he and Rangi will probably not be found do force Tek to grow up. However, this proves to be a double-edged sword as his voice breaks when he tries to sing to alert the town to his presence. Like Sawtooth in the previous story, Tek still holds on to the crazy hope that somehow his family will sense that he is missing and will come to find him.

Rangi is a mute Moa boy who is also in the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir. He seems to care only about one thing: his pet bear who was murdered on the day Rangi was adopted. He frequently runs away from the choir to go searching for its unmarked grave. After Tek shows him kindness, he brings Tek along when he runs away on the glacier. Like Big Red, Rangi symbolizes individuals who sink further into themselves to deal with pain.

The narrator of the final, titular story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” is Claudette. She is the preteen daughter of werewolves and details the process by which she and her sisters learned to live in the human world by the nuns of St. Lucy’s. Claudette is her human name, bestowed on her first day at the home.

Like many other characters, she wishes to grow up and enter the adult human world. She learns quickly and adapts to the human rules, many of which are unlike those of the wolf world. All but one, for “the main commandment of wolf life is Know Your Place, and that translated perfectly” (231).

However, Claudette learns to stop thinking of herself as part of a pack and to instead think as an individual. She also learns that being the best is not ideal in the human world, for people often hate the best. For the pack, that is the eldest sister, Jeanette, who adapts most quickly. Instead, Claudette aims to be middle-of-the-pack.

Claudette contrasts with Mirabella, who refuses to give up her wolfish ways. Eventually, Claudette learns to look down on Mirabella, even though her youngest sister saves her from making a fool of herself at the ball.

In the end, Claudette learns that being able to function as a human adult means leaving behind childhood altogether, just as she realizes that she no longer fits in with her werewolf parents any longer. 

The oldest wolf-girl sister, Jeanette adapts most quickly to human life. This is a source of hatred for the other girls, who resent her for progressing so quickly. Although she acts polite and caring, she ultimately betrays Claudette, revealing that her true wolf nature is not entirely gone.