Almost all of the stories in this collection feature child characters who wish to grow up. All but one of the stories (the exception is “Out to Sea”) features a child protagonist, and eight of these are from the first-person perspective of these children. The narrative implies or states that most of the children are 12 or 13 years old, in the uncertain in-between time after true childhood and before adulthood.

Author Karen Russell places most of these characters right at the cusp of childhood and describes the contradictory feeling of fear and curiosity that children feel when confronted with the adult world they do not yet understand but will soon enter. In Ava’s words from the first story, this is the “peculiar knot of fear and wonder and anger, the husk that holds my whole childhood” (5). Big Red from “City of Shells” feels that same anticipation and fear, which is described as “that unshucked, unsafe feeling. It was with her all the time, now” (176).

This sense, the knowing that there is something dark and difficult to come without knowing exactly what it entails, is the main subject that Russell tries to capture in almost every story.