From a vantage point some time in the future, Thea Atwell looks back at the year she was fifteen in Anton DiSclafani’s debut novel The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. It is only with this hindsight that Thea is able to make sense of the events which led up to her parents banishing her to North Carolina. She has only ever known her home in rural Florida, where her father is the only doctor for miles and the family’s wealth is buoyed by citrus. There, she and her twin brother Sam spend their days doing exactly what they want: for Thea this means riding her horse, Sasi; for Sam it means examining the natural world. The outside world consists of her aunt and uncle and her two-years-older cousin, Georgie, but they live in Gainesville.
Thea hints at the reasons why she has been sent away. She says early on that her parents were sending her to Yonahlossee so they “wouldn’t have to see me.” When she thinks of home she “wanted to weep, but I would not let myself. I had wept enough for a lifetime. Two lifetimes. Three.”
It doesn’t take her long to settle in to life at Yonahlossee, partly because one of the camp’s more popular girls, Sissy, befriends her and partly because Thea is an exceptional horsewoman. Life here is so different from life back home and the people back home seem to have forgotten her; her parents take turns writing and she hears nothing from Sam, once her closest companion.
The novel moves seamlessly between days at Yonahlossee and the days leading up to the “event” which caused her exile. In the meantime, she begins to understand her power when begins a relationship with an adult at the camp.
One of the students in my Young Adult Literature class read this book and called it “disgusting.” I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a coming-of-age story featuring a young woman trying to figure out what society and her parents expect from her and what she wants for herself. The fact that the novel is set in 1930 makes this all the more problematic. Thea has been sheltered by her parents’ money, but out in the world she comes to understand that everyone has not lived as she has. She is often selfish and petty, but she is also smart and free-spirited. Does she make some bad choices? Certainly. Are her choices “disgusting”? Certainly not.
At Yonahlossee I learned the lesson I had started to teach myself at home: my life was mine. And I had to lay claim to it.
This is a fabulous debut.
The Ludic Reader 