The God of Animals: A Novel by Aryn Kyle

Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen
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With the sure hand of a seasoned writer, Aryn Kyle has crafted a brilliant debut with her novel, The God of Animals. Alice Winston, living on the family horse ranch, a marginal enterprise in Desert Valley, Colorado, is a 12-year-old girl with more than she can handle and no one to help her cope. Polly, a classmate of hers, drowned in the nearby canal and was carried out by Alice's father, Joe, a member of the volunteer posse. Her older sister, 16-year-old Nona, eloped with a rodeo cowboy. Her mother never leaves her bedroom, a case of clinical depression. "My mother had spent nearly my whole life in her bedroom... Nona said that one day, while I was still a baby, our mother had handed me to her, said she was tired, and gone upstairs to rest. She never came back down."

Joe has little time for Alice, other than counting on her to muck out the stalls and be polite to the paying customers. He doesn't even notice that she has outgrown her clothes. What Kyle does with this scenario is never predictable or cliched. She writes beautifully of landscapes, interior and exterior, ravaged by extremes: the hottest summer in years, followed by a deluge; a lonely, isolated girl reaching out to a teacher, Mr. Delmar, equally alienated.

Alice starts telling lies, weaving bits and pieces of other people's lives into the tales she tells the teacher. What we eventually find out about her family is more poignant and tragic than anything she can make up. Horse lore is a large part of what explains each of the people in the novel: separating mares from their foals, the way a stud is treated, breaking a horse, ordinary everyday contact. This bond is explored in depth and each person: Alice, Nona, Joe, Joe's father, Alice's mother, is affected by this closeness in a different, unique way, revelatory of each individual's character. Much more than a coming-of-age tale, Kyle told a story of compromises and dreams that will never come true. --Valerie Ryan

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