The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls by Anton Disclavani (2013); Riverhead / Penguin is a discovery of the sort I seldom make these days: an immersive novel, written with assured literary skills, vision that knows when to pull into the foreground and expand out into landscape and horizon, an ear tuned to the subtleties of expression, of time and place.  Her sense of pacing is almost exquisite -- something learned from growing up as a rider, one wonders?





There seem to be two different jackets.  Perhaps the publisher felt the first cover was too girly?  But it broadcasts the era much better than the second one, which is the jacket on the copy I've got.  The first one is more appealing, with color and light.  This one is depressing.

However, the content of the novel is splendid, at least for this reader.  It's an historical novel (the Great Depression), set somewhere other than the usual favorite fictional locations, particularly for that era  (Florida and North Carolina) filled with a variety of girls and a narrator who must discover a larger world than family and horses, and filled also, then, with horses. Best of all, the voices of the characters are distinctly separate, despite the first person pov.

Our world has gone through so many changes since 1930: the Depression which resulted in FDR's New Deal and a federal social-financial safety network, bank and corporate regulations, World War II, the Civil Rights, Human Rights and Voting Rights acts, women owning their own businesses, holding local, state and federal offices, having all the necessary reproductive rights to which women are entitled everywhere.  None of this has taken place yet, in 1930. And currently? we're living in a time of perpetual war, in which all these progressive human rights achievements are under relentless attack, to be taken away.  Indeed, in many places -- particularly Florida and North Carolina -- these rights have already by-and-large disappeared, at least for those without any means to make up for what used to be rights, supported by the state(s) in which we live.

Full circle.  You cannot help but consider such matters, even while enjoyably submerged in a novel this well composed.