“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”

 This story was very compelling to me right off the bat, mostly because I personally adore urban fantasy. However, I was also pretty enthralled by the themes of the piece as I read it. It has themes of assimilationism and its effects, especially given that the girls are in schools run by the Catholic Church. The girls were given new, proper names and were expected to become fully human because it was better. However, this had largely negative effects on the girls. This is best shown in how they treat Mirabella - Claudette outright says that if they were still with their pack the girls would never treat her like they are, but they are all too focused on becoming “good” humans to actually care that she is being mistreated by both the nuns and them. Even so, Mirabella still tries to help Claudette at the dance, and Claudette responds by blaming her and getting her sent away from the school because Claudette didn’t want to stand up or thank her. 

Something especially poignant I found about this story is that at the beginning of it, it claimed that the  girls were supposed to be able to live in both the wolf and human cultures equally, but Claudette “couldn’t remember how to find the way back [home] on [her] own” (378) and her parents didn’t recognize her. Her first words to them were a lie, claiming that she was back home with them.

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