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Summary
Summary
"This summer's first romantic page turner."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Named a most anticipated book for Summer 2013 by The Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly and USA Today , NPR, and People summer reads pick
From the author of The After Party , coming May 2016, a lush, sexy, evocative debut novel of family secrets and girls'-school rituals, set in the 1930s South.
It is 1930, the midst of the Great Depression. After her mysterious role in a family tragedy, passionate, strong-willed Thea Atwell, age fifteen, has been cast out of her Florida home, exiled to an equestrienne boarding school for Southern debutantes. High in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with its complex social strata ordered by money, beauty, and girls' friendships, the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is a far remove from the free-roaming, dreamlike childhood Thea shared with her twin brother on their family's citrus farm--a world now partially shattered. As Thea grapples with her responsibility for the events of the past year that led her here, she finds herself enmeshed in a new order, one that will change her sense of what is possible for herself, her family, her country.
Weaving provocatively between home and school, the narrative powerfully unfurls the true story behind Thea's expulsion from her family, but it isn't long before the mystery of her past is rivaled by the question of how it will shape her future. Part scandalous love story, part heartbreaking family drama, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is an immersive, transporting page-turner--a vivid, propulsive novel about sex, love, family, money, class, home, and horses, all set against the ominous threat of the Depression--and the major debut of an important new writer.
Author Notes
Anton DiSclafani grew up in northern Florida, where she rode horses, competing nationally. She graduated from Emory University, and received her MFA from Washington University. She currently lives in Saint Louis, where she teaches creative writing at Washington University.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The setup for this debut novel is delectable: it's 1930, the country is tumbling into depression, and 15-year-old Thea has done something bad enough to get her sent from Florida to an elite year-round "camp" in North Carolina where, at least at first, the effects of the economy are kept at bay while affluent Southern girls become "ladies." DiScalfani, who grew up around horses, is at her best when recreating the intuition and strength of girls in the saddle. Otherwise Thea's narration feels flattened by history and the characters she encounters never achieve dimensionality. The build toward the revelation of Thea's crime is drawn out, sapping the reveal of drama, but the account of Thea's emerging sexuality provides meaningful reflections on the potency of teenage desire. Here too, however, DiScalfani seems distanced from her characters, relying on declarations such as "I was not weak," "I was angry," and "I was glum" when exploring the tension of conflicting feelings. Though there are many twists and turns, the prose numbs the pleasure of reading about even the most forbidden of Thea's trysts. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME Entertainment. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Set in the 1930s, full of alluring descriptions, and featuring a headstrong lead character, this is a literary novel that is also full of scandal, sex, and secrets. Fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell has been banished from her Florida family and sent to an exclusive equestrienne boarding school located high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Homeschooled along with her fraternal twin, Thea had lived an overprotected and insular existence until the tragic incident that triggered her ouster from the family. Thrust into a complicated social milieu of southern debutantes and their rigid pecking order based on money, lineage, and looks, Thea struggles with overwhelming feelings of guilt and homesickness as well as the challenge of fitting into her new school. But she also begins to feel her power, both because she knows she is beautiful and because she is an expert rider. Some readers will be put off by the book's deliberate pacing and explicit sex scenes, but others will be held in thrall by the world so vividly and sensually rendered in a novel that is as sophisticated in its writing as it is in its themes. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This stellar debut novel was reported to have been bought for seven figures and has received blurbs from such high-profile authors as Curtis Sittenfeld and Lauren Groff.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE year is 1930 and the country has slid into the Great Depression. Fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell has been ejected from her family home in Florida for doing something very, very bad. Her punishment: to be remanded to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. A child of privilege, Thea has grown up in near isolation on a citrus plantation, with her twin brother, Sam, and 16-year-old cousin, Georgie, as her closest companions. Once deposited and uniformed, Thea comes to realize that Yonahlossee isn't just an elite summer camp but a year-round school and - cue "Hotel California" - she's not going anywhere for a long time. This is the promising opening of Anton DiSclafani's ambitious first novel, which positions a world of horseback riding, romance and Southern snobbery against the backdrop of the country's worst economic trial. It's not an easy pairing, imagining girls in polished riding boots sneaking liquor and enjoying liaisons while people in surrounding Appalachia struggle just to find enough to eat. As DiSclafani writes, the school is "an island of rich girls in the middle of the poorest." Not only that, there are girls at Yonahlossee "who refused to believe or at least admit that the North had claimed victory in the War Between the States." One has to respect DiSclafani's enterprise, even if her efforts fall flat. A former equestrian competitor, she is best when describing equine pedagogy, the minutiae of tack and hoof care, the talk of fetlocks and forelocks, leading her readers to understand why teenage girls can be so enthralled with horses: they require care but also serve as empowerment symbols, providing a shield against fear as well as a socially sanctioned metaphorical outlet for sexual urges. Unfortunately, there's just so much of this you can handle if you're not a teenage girl and crazy about horses. Thea only gradually lets the reader in on all the details of her terrible secret. This coyness prevents us from getting to know and like her, and it makes DiSclafani's attempts to create drama feel contrived. Throw in the distant mother who has banished Thea, the isolated childhood, the girls in their all-white uniforms and the underlying suggestion of incest and taboo, and everything gets very "Flowers in the Attic." A further hindrance is DiSclafani's not always careful prose, as when Thea describes the joy of riding her horse fast on a moonlit night: "I could do this forever, was how I felt; and what else is there to say about galloping?" While some of DiSclafani's descriptions of teenage sexuality seem credible, most are either awkward or too vivid for their particular context. At one point, Thea fantasizes about her friend Sissy and Sissy's secret paramour, Boone: "I thought of Boone gently and urgently kneading her breasts." Which sounds to me like a bad mammogram, a really bad third date or instructions for how to make gnocchi. The good news is that the novel finally achieves some forward motion in its muddied final laps, heroically unscrambling a host of plot lines. In the course of all this, Thea will engage in more bad behavior, without exhibiting any remorse or sense of conflict, rendering her even less likable. "I had wanted something very badly," she calmly explains, "and then I had gotten it, and the getting kept getting better." She sounds like a middle-aged madam rather than the independent young woman DiSclafani presumably intended. The book is a cinematic, image-heavy exercise: DiSclafani presents us with luscious visuals like the Yonahlossee girls riding in their radiant uniforms under the tutelage of their German riding coach - or taking silent baths in a room filled with nothing but steamy tubs, each girl in her own tub, servant at the ready with clean white towels. You can practically see the trailer for the Sofia Coppola movie. There's a saying in the horse world, often grumbled by parents whose bank accounts have been emptied by the sport's high cost but who are relieved by the knowledge that their teenage daughters are more obsessed with horses than they are with boys: Horseback riding is the world's most expensive form of birth control. Apparently, Thea Atwell never got the memo. Alex Kuczynski is the author of "Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery."
Kirkus Review
DiSclafani's debut chronicles a teenager's life-changing year at an elite boarding school in the North Carolina mountains. Thea arrives at the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, expanded years earlier to a year-round school, in the summer of 1930. She has been sent away from her home in central Florida for an initially mysterious offense, and she bitterly regrets her exile from the isolated rural paradise she roamed freely with her twin brother, Sam. Though she frequently tells us she has rarely spent time with anyone other than relatives, Thea is a self-assured newcomer who quickly assumes a favored spot in the girls' pecking order, partly because she's taken up by popular Sissy, partly because she's an excellent horsewoman, but mostly because this stunned survivor of family ostracism seems to her peers a cool, detached observer indifferent to their approval. In elegant prose that evokes the cadences of a vanished epoch, DiSclafani unfolds at a leisurely pace the twin narratives of Thea's odyssey at school and the charged relationship with her cousin Georgie that led to a confrontation with Sam and disgrace. Sympathetic new friends, like the school's headmaster, Mr. Holmes, help her see that her parents unfairly chose to punish her and protect Sam, but as Thea and Holmes move into an affair, she acknowledges the fierce, unabashed sexuality that frightened her family and means she will never be the sort of proper young lady Yonahlossee was designed to cultivate. Times are changing, even in this privileged enclave; several girls have to leave when their ruined fathers can no longer pay the bills, and Thea's family is forced to sell the home she yearns for. DiSclafani writes with equal intelligence and precision about female desire and a rider's kinship with her horse; her perfectly judged denouement allows Thea to simultaneously sacrifice herself for a friend and defiantly affirm that she will only be "a right girl" on her own terms. An unusually accomplished and nuanced coming-of-age drama.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In her debut, DiSclafani tells the story of Thea Atwell, a sheltered 15-year-old with a terrible secret, who is sent to Yonahlossee in 1930 as punishment. Despite its name, the camp is a year-round school, and this coming-of-age story becomes less a journey of self-discovery and more a superficial look at teenage girls set against extensive details about horses and equestrians. Thea is selfish, unstable, and unlikable, and except for the horses, the other characters are shallow and underdeveloped. Combine that with the protracted foreshadowing surrounding Thea's secret and the very graphic sex scenes, and a potentially promising story transforms into a slow-paced novel about a remorseless teen. Adina Yerson's narration is well paced for this disappointing coming-of-age tale. verdict Recommended only where there is demand. ["Engrossing, empathetic, and atmospheric, this debut will resonate with readers as the author eloquently portrays the inevitable missteps in coming of age. Highly recommended," read the much more enthusiastic starred review of the Riverhead hc, LJ 5/1/13.]-Denise -Garofalo, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib, Newburgh, NY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
