Helpful Score: 1
This book is amazing all the way through from start to finish. Each of the first few chapters is so beautifully constructed it could stand alone as a brilliant short. I couldn't believe how much I loved this story and this family and their clients, all their terrible joys and crippling failures, even at the painful end.
Alice's father Joe runs their horse ranch, and her mother is a mental invalid - ever since the day she handed newborn Alice over to her 6 year old daughter Nona she's been bedridden. Now Nona the older sister has run away to marry some rodeo guy she just met, and about the same time that happened, a girl Alice knew at school was drowned in a nearby creek. Alice is sensitive and isolated, she knows she'll never be the talented rider that her sister always was, will never have the kind of money that their obnoxious boarders throw around, and she makes herself vulnerable to an english teacher she spends far too much time on the phone with at night.
I've never been one of those horse-crazy types, but reading Aryn Kyle's descriptions of life training horses, even I could appreciate the attraction: from the miracle of foal birthing and the white-knuckled thrill of blue ribbon victories, to the mundane everyday chores and rhythm of this admittedly dysfunctional family and its business.
Alice's father Joe runs their horse ranch, and her mother is a mental invalid - ever since the day she handed newborn Alice over to her 6 year old daughter Nona she's been bedridden. Now Nona the older sister has run away to marry some rodeo guy she just met, and about the same time that happened, a girl Alice knew at school was drowned in a nearby creek. Alice is sensitive and isolated, she knows she'll never be the talented rider that her sister always was, will never have the kind of money that their obnoxious boarders throw around, and she makes herself vulnerable to an english teacher she spends far too much time on the phone with at night.
I've never been one of those horse-crazy types, but reading Aryn Kyle's descriptions of life training horses, even I could appreciate the attraction: from the miracle of foal birthing and the white-knuckled thrill of blue ribbon victories, to the mundane everyday chores and rhythm of this admittedly dysfunctional family and its business.
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