Book review

I just finished reading a great novel, "The God of Animals." Let me just say I was a sobbing mess while reading the final pages, and that's all I'll say about THAT in order to not spoil the ending. :)

I can't remember how I found it. I'm always trolling for new books and looking for recommendations, especially for book club reading material. It's writer Aryn Kyle's first book, which is perfectly amazing as it's such a great story. The narrator is Alice Winston, who I believe is 12 when this coming-of-age story starts. As if the whole "coming-of-age" thing isn't hard enough under normal circumstance, Alice is dealing with the death of a classmate, the fact that her older sister has recently run away with a rodeo cowboy, her mom's refusal (for years) to leave her bedroom, and her dad's exhausting efforts to keep the family's horse breeding and showing operation going.

Alice is a loner who struggles with relationships, and it's really sad to see her trying to make her way, particularly since she receives very little attention from her parents. All of the relationships in the book are complicated and murky; nothing is what it seems. There's a sense that each character has hopes and dreams, but it's certainly not predictable as the story unfolds as to whether those hopes and dreams will be realized.

The family's business is also full of complications, like the challenge of raising horses in such a hardscrabble setting, keeping up with the competition and the pressures of wooing of new customers. For the reader with horse experience there are bound to be elements of the familiar in the passages involving training horses, the crazy mix of tedium and drama at horse shows, the competition with other riders and barns, and barn personality dynamics.

I haven't read a horsey novel in a while, and this powerful story definitely was a great pick. But I should've had the tissues handy.