I've Got the Horse Right Here

My current gym book (yes, I read on the elliptical. These books go very slowly, since I only read about 20 pages at a time, 3-4 times per week) is The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle. It takes place on a horse farm. Most girls go through a "horse period" during childhood, reading books like My Friend Flicka and Black Beauty, perhaps starting a collection of resin horse figurines, and, if they're very lucky, taking riding lessons. I was not one of those girls. I missed the whole phenomenon, although as a young book glutton I'm sure I had copies of both books. A good friend of mine took riding lessons for a year or so, and I used to go to the equestrian center with her to look at the horses. To me, they were just big smelly animals with lots of snot in their noses. Reading this book--about horse shows and riding lessons--feels like a second chance at this rite of passage.

The God of Animals and The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, which I'm also currently reading, are proving to be an interesting pairing. Both are narrated by pre-teen girls, and both girls are severely manipulative. In God, a girl in the narrator's grade in school has drowned. Not particuarly close to the girl except for a shared project in shop class, the girl is exaggerating their friendship to insinuate herself into the drama. In Life, Ellen Foster calls the foster home administrators to have the other two girls in her foster home removed, so she is the only child left with her guardian. Not to say those girls didn't deserve it . . . Since I'm still not very far in either book, it's hard to say what all this manipulation will come to, but it is an interesting commentary on pre-teen girls. I think we all knew at least one of these girls growing up . . . and hopefully it wasn't us!

Both books are considered adult novels. (Adult as in not children's, not XXX.) There was an interesting argument a few years back in one of the publishing world journals about what constitutes a YA novel and what is an adult novel when the narrator is a young adult. This came up around the time of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which sold well in both markets. I think the difference is whether it's a childlike view of the narrator's world, or a view seasoned by adulthood. Both of these books have the latter. There's enough nuance in the narrative that we see the manipulation working its way out in the girls' actions along with hints of the pain the girls are feeling that leads to the manipulation. It'll be interesting to see how each story progresses.