Apr 27, 2007

Author’s debut novel sees girl face adult realities

By Terri Schlichenmeyer / Book Reviewer

"The God of Animals"
By Aryn Kyle
Scribner
$25, 320 pages

Generally speaking, most kids are surprised when they find out they don't know everything there is to know about their parents.

To a kid, it's simple: Mom is Mom and Dad is the other half of the equation. Then one day, it becomes apparent that your parents aren't so transparent. The discovery that parents are people, too, can be kind of a shocker.

In the novel "The God of Animals" by Aryn Kyle, Alice Wilson thinks she knows her family well, and finding out otherwise marks the moment she begins to grow up.

All her life, Alice Wilson has known how fragile her mother is. The story goes that when Alice was just a baby, her mother handed her to Nona, Alice's older sister, and went upstairs.

She hasn't come down since.

Now, because Nona's run off with a rodeo cowboy, it's up to 11-year-old Alice to fetch dinner and anything else her mother needs. Along with household chores, Alice helps her father care for the barn and the horses on their Colorado ranch.

Years ago, the ranch was profitable, but these days Joe Wilson just scrapes by. Every month, he shuffles money around in white envelopes until the envelopes are fat enough to pay bills. When this fails, his horse-breeding enterprise becomes a horse-boarding outfit, much to Alice's disappointment.

Success, according to Joe, is always coming. If Sheila, the too-perky teenager who takes riding lessons, can learn showmanship, she'll bring her friends to the ranch. If the women who board their horses are allowed to treat the barn as some sort of clubhouse, they'll keep coming back. If Joe can find a one-of-a-kind horse to train, he can sell it for much more than he paid for it.

If only things could be the way they once were, Alice thinks. She misses Nona, and she wonders why her father stays married to the ghost-like woman who lives upstairs. Wanting a secret all her own, Alice begins to make late-night calls to a male teacher who listens to her and reads poetry to her over the phone.

But there are certain truths that kids only learn when they stop being kids. For Alice, those truths come galloping in on the back of a brutal accident.

"The God of Animals" is filled with harshness, beauty, and one of the most memorably precocious heroines you'll ever meet. Alice is wise beyond her years, not yet ready to accept the hard realities of the people in her circle but, even so, able to learn forgiveness, love and the complexity of relationships. Kyle's writing style is so vivid that you'll want to spit the dust out of your mouth every time anyone's boots hit the ground in this perfectly crafted debut novel.