Publishers Weekly
06/11/2018
In English’s uneven debut, high schooler Teagan French lives an idyllic life at Blue View, her family’s Virginia farm. Her days consist of riding horses; campfires in the woods with her best friend, Grace; and outdoor dinners under cloudless skies. Teagan lives with her mother, the strong-willed, horse-loving Susanna; her older brother, the kind but distant Charlie; and her hard-to-please father, Robert. However, Robert seems less like himself every day. When he brings home an obstinate new gelding, Obsidian, and then abruptly leaves his family for another woman, Obsidian is christened Ian and given to Teagan. As her family crumbles around her, Teagan chooses a new path for herself at an equestrian-focused boarding school a few hours away. She deals with pain and heartbreak there with a new cast of roommates and friends, all the while battling to train the strong-willed Ian, hoping to find something she can truly trust amid the turmoil. With short, punchy chapters and both first- and third-person narration from Teagan, the novel moves well, but the story can feel unfocused; scenes of boarding school antics are highly detailed, while major moments—like the abrupt and dramatic ending—are vague. English is a talented writer whose strong, striking sentences compensate for the weaker aspects of the story. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Horse, by Talley English, might look like another story about a girl and her horse, which it is and is more: an unflinching examination of what it is to be an animal, what it is to be human, the difference and overlap between the two, and how to manage that intersection. Anyone who’s ever tried to care for a creature from a hamster on up will love it and learn from it. Brilliantly written, and ruthlessly felt, this novel marks the debut of a talent strong for the long haul.” —Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising
“A sharp yet spare debut . . . English’s writing, which is hauntingly ascetic, mirrors the many things left unsaid in the French family.” —Booklist
“From National Velvet to Misty of Chincoteague, the girl-equine bond is a literary cliché, but English’s debut novel breaks that tradition. Written in short, elegant chapters resembling prose poems, Horse bucks traditional narrative form . . . Insightful yet free of sentimentality, English’s book reaches a surprising and resonant conclusion.”—The National Book Review
“To read Talley English’s wonderful debut novel is to learn something true: about riding a horse, about taking risks, about friendship, about parents who disappoint, about growing up. English evokes a vibrant world with grit, patience, and insight.” —Emily Culliton, author of The Misfortune of Marion Palm
“Here’s what this novel about a girl and a horse isn’t: it isn’t a YA story. It’s unmistakably a novel by a poet. Poetic, if that’s taken to mean nothing like flowery, but having the quality of serious poetry, words chosen and sentences made for clarity that surprises . . . You might close this novel in tears without knowing at first where they came from. They won’t have come only from sadness but also from beauty, more than you expected, and where you weren’t necessarily expecting it . . . Full of feeling.”—George Ensberger, Shawangunk Journal
“An original portrait of family disruption, the relationship of horse and rider, and ongoing grief . . . [Told] in limpid, affecting language.” —Library Journal
“Every animal in this novel—dog, goose, cat, horse, or human—comes across as utterly real. Talley English magically combines the narrative drive of a novelist with the linguistic sensitivity of a poet and the wisdom of a woman who has lived her life in nature. A book for anyone who loves horses and good novels.” —Pinckney Benedict, author of Dogs of God
“I am stunned by the book, which at least makes me feel as though I understand a little bit what it’s like to be a young woman going through more than she realizes at the moment, and how a connection with another animal can allow us to make sense of ourselves when nothing else seems to . . . Horse gets at some murky, painful, and honest stuff.”—Philip Martin, Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette
“Very well written . . . Tensions between Robert and Susanna French are skillfully rendered from the anxious, bewildered perspective of their daughter . . . English’s stripped-down prose works well to convey Teagan’s increasing alienation.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Talley English is a writer of power and perception. Horse is a word of one syllable like the titles of most chapters in this novel, which together compile a kind of lexicon of simplicity—a language of reference points for a girl who’s tuned in to baby goose and barn cat and dog—but, as Teagan says of her relationship with her parents, it’s “complicated,” too. The language spoken between human and horse is English, better than semiotics, a way of reading signs so supple that after much training together, the horse can sense the command if the human merely thinks it. Into this landscape where boundaries erase, must, of course, come grief to make a way for us to bridge beyond. This is a nuanced portrayal of the world we might remember wandering once, a memoir of a novel that gives us a language for our grief over the world we miss, the one in which animals were our brothers and sisters, when the world was big enough to hold all of us at once.” —Cathryn Hankla, author of Lost Places
“Horse is about the beauty of words. About the beauty of relationships. About the beauty of beauty. What the author has captured with this novel is a unique combination of stunning language, heartwarming and heartbreaking relationships, and gorgeous scenery and landscapes. Horse is an astounding debut, a multi-layered novel that clearly marks Talley English as a writer to watch.” —Scott Loring Sanders, author of Surviving Jersey
School Library Journal
★ 07/01/2018
When Teagan, the 14-year-old protagonist of this fine debut novel, shops for two cats at the local animal shelter with her older brother Charlie, she asks to see the felines on "death row." "We want something that doesn't care about people," she explains, choosing a shy tabby missing half an ear and a tomcat with no teeth. Thus Slinky and Gums join a menagerie of horses and dogs living in Virginia at Blue View, a few acres that Teagan and her family are hanging on to, just barely. The members of this household love animals but can't communicate with one another. When Robert, the father, abruptly walks out, he leaves his thoroughbred gelding Obsidian, nicknamed Ian, behind. Robert's absence greatly impacts Teagan and her mother, Susannah. Teagan's mastery of the willful Ian progresses even as she flounders, unable to let Robert back into her life when he settles nearby. Slowly Teagan learns to trust her instincts about Ian—and herself. Constructed as a series of vignettes, this quiet, restrained novel downplays emotional catharsis, allowing teens to read between the lines, much like Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. VERDICT A shining debut for coming-of-age collections focusing on promising young authors. Recommended for serious readers and animal lovers alike.—Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY
Kirkus Reviews
2018-05-01
English's debut views a girl's coming-of-age through the lens of her relationship with the thoroughbred her father leaves behind when her parents split up.It's the summer before Teagan starts high school, and tensions between Robert and Susanna French are evident—and skillfully rendered from the anxious, bewildered perspective of their daughter—even before he moves out to live with another woman. Teagan decides to go to a girls boarding school with a riding program not far from the family's home in rural Virginia; that way she can get away from her shellshocked mother without cutting herself off entirely. She navigates the social complexities of her new environment while grappling with Ian, a headstrong, "seasoned foxhunter" bought to assuage Robert's midlife crisis and not the easiest horse for an adolescent girl to handle. Short, brooding first-person interpolations from Teagan many years later suggest that things are not going to turn out well in the main narrative, which appears to take place in the late 1980s. Indeed, even as Teagan develops a rapport with Ian, her new friendships are faltering, her schoolwork is slipping, and her mother is worried enough to send her to a psychologist, caustically dubbed "the vampire" by Teagan. English's stripped-down prose works well to convey Teagan's increasing alienation as she decides not to go back to boarding school and pulls further away from her father after he announces he's marrying the new girlfriend. But this spare style also gives the novel an oddly distanced quality; none of Teagan's relationships have much emotional force, with the notable exception of her complex bond with Ian—which makes the impulsive decision that triggers the denouement all the more jolting. It doesn't seem to fit what until then has been a fairly typical coming-of-age tale, and an epilogue set in Arkansas is simply baffling.Very well written but alternately predictable and jarring.
