satire? maybe. entertaining? you bet.

My favorite part about this book is that I probably never would've read it on my own. But read it I have, and alongside my nine fellow grad student friends at that. We've created a plethora of memes surrounding the plot and characters and get to meet the author sooner rather than later when she visits for a visiting writer event at my university. I mean to be blunt rather than accusatory when I say this, but this is not the most well-written book to ever exist. Its characters seem overly self-aware at times, the murder mystery element of the plot feels slightly out of place when examining the whole narrative, and I consistently questioned how seriously all the stuff about the "horse world" should be taken. But if this book is meant to follow the narrative journey of Heather Parker, former horse girl, current nouveau rich struggling mom and wife living vicariously through her horse girl wannabe daughters, then the satirical elements I suspect are supposed to be read into work very well. I stand by my statement of overly self-aware characters, but I advocate the author's decision to solely focus on the perspectives of the female characters (the title does have the specific word girls in it, after all). This lends a sense of mystery to the few male characters in the story, which, in turn, elevates the struggles and viewpoints of the girls and women. There are some truly laughable things that happen in this book, among them being a little girl smashing through a vinyl fence on the side of a horse, someone's dad murdering their kid's mom, someone else's mom nearly having sex with the guy who ends up getting her daughter pregnant, and said daughter thinking you can't get pregnant just from having sex. If that all sounds complicated, it's because it is. But I couldn't put this book down, and it lent my two-hour night class with plenty of content for conversation and debate. I'm still trying to figure out if the girl on the cover is a character or just a stock photo model. The case is yet to be closed. 


One of my favorite quotes from Girls and Their Horses:

"No one ever really explained what you were supposed to do with children. Were you supposed to make them happy, or were you supposed to make them good? And how could you do either when you were probably not happy or good yourself?"

(I can't find it right now, but there's literally a quote along the lines of, "You can't get pregnant just from having sex.")

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