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levKw The Ghosts of South Florida Mark Budman St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Karen Russell Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 256 pages; cloth, $22.00 Why should The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth be considered literary fiction' while alternative history books by Harry Turtledove are genre? Moreover, how is a literary ghost different from his lowly genre counterpart? Arc his claws more exquisitely trimmed or his fangs more intricately curved? Does his blood drip in more shapely rivulets or his moans follow the beats of Mozart's symphonies? Broadly speaking, where do you draw the line between the dreaded genre in the ravine and the literary world on top of the hill? Does this line still exist or has it been smeared and deconstructed by the intrepid pioneers of the magic realism world, writers the caliber ofGabriel Garcia Marquez, Aimee Bender, and, now, Karen Russell? Every story in the young author's debut collection has its own ghost, unless the protagonist is a werewolf cub-child, sent for cultural reeducation to the nunnery, a child who becomes human only when she utters her first lie. Imagine Harry Potter meeting Dickens's Oliver. In the case of the cub-child, her own past, present, and future torment her instead of the ghost. In addition to the normal ghost's employment , haunting, these ghosts do everything possible under the sun and the moon, including making love tp the protagonist's sister and hiding in underwater grottos. But even if they are still living, every single character in each story is still tormented one way or another and has his or her skeleton in the closet, even if this is an exoskeleton. Of course, life is never onedimensional , so many stories are infused with satire. Of macabre variety, of course. Don't forget, this is a pack of not yet tamed werewolves we are dealing with: "they found Mirabella...trying to strangle a. mallard with her rosary beads." And the ghosts in the collection are of a Floridian stock, a regional variety suited for the humid climate endurance, dune sliding on giant crab exoskeletons, cleaning after seagulls, gators wrestling, and early blossoming sexuality. The title story's plot, though dealing with the children of werewolves raised by nuns, could be considered a metaphor for race relationships, punctuated with frequent use of the term "brothers" and "sisters" applied to werewolves' cubs. Or it's a metaphor forjuvenile crime and societal punishment. Or it's a metaphor for immigration and xenophobia. The presence of metaphors, whatever they are, and the intricate language they are constructed with, give Russell's stories an edge over traditional genre. That, and the astute observations of the ordinary world: "the way that squirrels are saved from looking like rodents by their poofy tails." Two little blemishes mar the otherwise nearperfect skin of his collection. Call the first one immaturity or call it too close following of the current literary trend, but in some stories, notably "Haunting Olivia," the ending is suspended in the air, failing to create a resolution. "Olivia could be everywhere." Considering that the plot of story is essentially a quest of two brothers for their dead sister, it leaves too much to the imagination. Imagine Harry Potter meeting Dickens's Oliver. Granted, an intelligent writer expects an intelligent reader to cooperate with her in the story's creation , but leaving off the piece almost in the middle of a sentence is too much. This ending contrasts markedly with the ending ofthe title story collection, where the above-mentioned former werewolf cub is facing her parents: "So," I said, telling my first human lie. "I'm home." But, on the other hand, children mature fast in the swamps of South Florida. The second one is that though all the protagonists in the collection are children, they talk and think like adults. "I've got Dad '.s blond hair and blue eyes, his embraceably lanky physique." Embraceably ! Is this an Emily Bronte character who has wandered into a time travel machine? The boy who said that did not even reach his teens, and he's not a bookworm by any means. In "Ava...

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