As Aryn Kyle's The God of Animals opens, Alice Winston is twelve years old, her shop class partner Polly has died, her teenage sister has run off and married a rodeo rider, and her mother has rarely gotten out of bed since Alice was an infant. This is a hard-luck coming-of-age story set on a struggling horse farm in the desert west. Like the horses it glorifies, the book starts off at a walk, then develops into a trot, then a canter, and then a full gallop. In fact, it doesn't really hit its stride until about two-thirds of the way through. Also, I think that even the most tragic story requires a little bit of humor, and my only other complaint about this book is that it has no humor whatsoever. On the plus side, the characters are very real, although no one is particularly loveable. Alice herself is so embarrassed by her family that she tells innumerable bold-faced lies, inventing lofty professions for her father and brother-in-law, hoping to raise her own status with school friends and a teacher that she phones every night. Eventually, Alice comes to learn that almost everyone is flawed, even those who seem to have a perfect life and those whom she admires most. One of my favorite bits of irony is that, although not the horsewoman her sister was, Alice rides Darling for a blue ribbon in the reining class, after chastising her father for foolishly buying the mare in the first place.
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