KEY POINTS:
Aryn Kyle's flinty first novel is on fire with horses: spotted mares and aging thoroughbreds vying for expression alongside new foals and bow-legged killers, the last of which Kyle's 12-year-old narrator Alice Winston explains, "were good for nothing but ... schoolroom glue."
The quip is typical of Alice, who over the course of The God of Animals tries mightily to grow into her precocious cynicism. Her mother languishes upstairs with depression, her sister has run away with a cowboy, and as the novel begins, Alice's classmate turns up dead, clogging a storm drain. Alice's father - a rancher turned riding instructor and stable-keeper for the well-to-do - finds the dead girl. "You stay away from that canal when walking home, Alice," he says.
Handling a pre-teen with words is akin to expecting a horse to canter without reins: only the skilled need apply. And Alice's father may know horses, but he is hopeless with girls. Alice flirts with danger then steps back, behaves well then two-steps toward sexual experience.
The book throbs with sexual tension. Like many adolescents, Alice assumes she is at the centre of it all and that nothing is lost on her. She watches her father from the fence line as he flirts with other women and sniffs during one Friday night on the town, "I had never known my father could dance."
The animals in Kyle's book are magnificent symbols. They twist and writhe and defy the men and women on their backs. They need to be controlled, and Kyle writes about this process so well it's hard not to wince with the unfairness.
Pushed to her emotional limits by her home life, Alice reasons the way through the pain is to cause more - and eventually it catches up with her. On top of it all, as her father obsesses about making a living, Alice becomes the glue, or so she thinks, keeping their household together.
Kyle switches gears late in the novel and drives her tale toward the kind of dramatic conclusion it leads you to believe is coming from page one. There are some rough patches along the way. But by the end, Kyle controls the story like a natural born storyteller. Indeed, Alice's father could be describing the narrative, and not just a soon-to-be-broken mare, when he yells: "She was smooth ... Even when she was jumping and thrashing around, it was like riding water."
-John Freeman is president of the (US) National Book Critics Circle.
* Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $36.99
