Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
Behind the scenes at a racetrack is no place to be a girl. Black eyes, broken bones, unwelcome attention. It’s a dangerous world. You gotta work twice as hard, and keep a weapon handy.
Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is short, punchy, and vivid. Like a rodeo-rode. Shocking in places.
For Sonia, though, the horses made it worthwhile. At sixteen she learns how to gallop, use bits, run bandages, put a mud-knot in a tail, tie reins. She learns how to read a horse. She becomes a professional trainer.
“Most racehorses bleed from the lungs when they run.”
Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is short, punchy, and vivid. Like a rodeo-rode. Shocking in places. Most chapters are less than two pages, and are built around a single image or idea. They’re anecdotes. Lean, muscular, and tough - yet passionate and moving too. It reminded me of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
The voice of the narrator Sonia is superb, and it’s fascinating to see in the author’s Afterword, that the novel was built upon interview transcripts with a horse trainer called Sonia. The raw material is fact: the product is fiction: the effect is an explosive warts-and-all sprint through the life of a horse trainer. This is not Dick Francis.
Riveting.
The Gallon of Blood chapter is shocking.
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