Out of The Blue

“I tell myself it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to look like one of them.  I don’t need to belong.” I wish this were my Truth.

30.12 The Scorpio Races

A friend lent me this a few months ago, along with a stack of probably ten other books, so I was feeling the need to get some of those back to her and decided to pull one that I had no expectations for.  I had never heard of this book, or read the author’s other YA series, but I have certainly seen them around.

Quite honestly, I hated the first half.  The action built very slowly and it was easy to see where it was going.  It is a rewriting of a myth so I guess that is to be expected, but since I didn’t know this I found myself bored.  The setting was a bit disorienting because the myth develops slowly, and there are no geographical or time cues given making it hard to imagine where or when all of this is taking place.  We also have alternating points of view that are totally the same voice.  The title chapter indicates whose voice we are reading, and frankly without that we would have no idea.  So I started to kind of push my way though just to get it over with and suddenly I found myself very deeply entrenched in the story of this girl trying to help her family just by being her.  No magical creature or unaccounted for help, just her and the support of people who love her.  SO GREAT!  I read the last 300 pages in a day, and by the end was sobbing with both happiness and heartbreak.

This is a rough book though.  It is violent and sad.  The bad guys are bad; the good guys are good but rarely rewarded.  It is about people who love horses and you know how that goes.  We readers often end up loving animals much more than the humans and their pain feels much more intense. This is not a happily ever after story in the conventional sense, but I did find it hopeful.  It is a YA book, but I would say you would have to put it in the hands of a pretty mature reader who would stick to it thorough the slow going plot development and be able to handle the harsh realities as the story unfolds.  But in the end it was a pretty successful read for me, and I never thought that would happen.