Karen Russell is one of the most effective, imaginative, and entertaining writers of today.ALLIGATOR WRESTLING, rehab for lupine girls, epidemic insomnia, vampires who slake their bloodthirst with lemons - lovers of delectably strange and surreal worlds can’t help but gravitate toward Karen Russell.

I see Karen Russell as a writer who has learned to use the proven literary techniques so effectively that the reader willingly enters the world of each story no matter how off-kilter it happens to be. Usually in story collections there are stories near the end that don’t quite measure up to the early stories, but in ‘Orange World’ there is not a weak story among the eight. The stories are long, usually 30 or 40 pages, In each story Russell builds a complete fascinating imagined world where this strange event might actually happen. “ His wild eyes were like bees trapped on the wrong side of a window, bouncing along the glass.” When the aforementioned young women look out the window of the ski lodge, they see the face of one of the ghost men who inhabit the place. I mentioned Russell’s use of simile, and this is a tried-and-true literary method that she uses effectively throughout. There is also quite a lot of comedy and humor as the characters in these stories react to their strange unusual circumstances. These situations are vivid and entertaining throughout. The author puts us inside the persons who are experiencing these strange things. Through the clever use of metaphors, similes, and other literary devices, Karen Russell makes each of these stories almost believable to the point where we readers withhold our skepticism. The stories of course require a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Each story has its ghostly or fantastical premise. ‘In ‘Orange World’ a woman makes a deal with a porcupine-looking devil in hopes of keeping her baby healthy. In ‘The Tornado Auction’, customers buy and sell tornadoes for their own enjoyment and fun. In ‘Bog Girl: A Romance’, a teenage boy falls in love with a girl who was murdered two thousand years ago and whose body was preserved in a peat bog. In ‘The Prospectors’, two young venturesome women visiting a ski resort are entertained by a group of twenty-five men who were buried in an avalanche when the Evergreen Lodge was first being built. ‘Orange World’, stories by Karen Russell (2019) – 266 pagesĮach story in ‘Orange World’ has a supernatural element which drives the story.

Karen russell orange world review