The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles

I picked this up without knowing much about it other than that it was "a classic" with a famous film based on it. I think I enjoyed it all the more for not even knowing when it was written, as it took me a while to understand that the all-knowing Victorian narrator was not what he seemed. In fact this read as a swinging sixties take on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, with an unsettlingly uncertain ending. Fascinating stuff, with a lot of good material about Victorian ideas on science, progress, Darwinism, religion, sex, class, & the role of women - I found it impossible to put down, and read it in a day.

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves - Karen Russell

This is one I borrowed from the library solely on the basis of the intriguing title. I didn't have particularly high hopes of it, as I thought I might find the magical aspects a little alienating. However, in most cases the fantastic touches (such as the children of werewolves sent away to be rehabilitated in the title story, or the determined minotaur bravely pulling his family's wagon westward) lived up to the suggestion of the review on the back that they would "jog something in the childhood memory department" - in fact the mythical elements served as helpful metaphors making the characters easier to relate to (rather than harder, as I often find with magic realism). In the stories that worked best for me, I think this was because although the scenarios and characters described drew on an altered reality, once the situations had been introduced they played out entirely according to the rules of our own world.

I also liked one or two of the tales that were entirely unmagical - a lonely old man encouraging his (community service) "buddy" to visit by leaving out medication for her to steal, and a young astronomer drawn into stealing baby turtles by his desire for social status (a story which did a great job of capturing the destructive momentum of a joke gone sour). The fragment that sticks with me is the horrifically plausible story of a boy whose adoptive father boasts proudly that the first thing they ever did together as father and son was to bury the bear cub that was the boy's only friend (which had of course been shot the day he was collected from the children's home).