What is it like to be abandoned over the
summer holidays far from home with a tedious set of cousins on a boring farm
where everything is dirty, smelly, and unfamiliar? This is the vacation Nell is facing in Sarah
Lean’s story A Hundred Horses. It
doesn’t take long for the joy of living close to the land and a mysterious
appearance of wild girl Angel and her special horses to ensure Nell is
intrigued.
What I found so fascinating in the novel
was Lean’s ability to capture that lurching feeling of confusion as Nell treads
the challenging path of trying to understand who to trust and how to navigate
her own feelings of loneliness and distrust of domineering adults. Angel is
aggressive and terrifying, appearing unexpectedly; she is more malevolent than
fairy-like and Nell is spun about in her seeking for meaning.
 |
| Sarah Lean |
Having grown up in a rural area where
hanging out on the farms of my friends showed me it’s not all fluffy goslings
and cute foals, I appreciated the mixed emotions of Nell’s experience. The land
can be awe inspiring but also a dramatic reminder of elemental forces and
emotions at play in our world. I can highly recommend this book, especially for
those in the early tween years who are torn between doing the right thing and
facing the realities of emerging understanding of more than the immediate world
of family and personal feelings.
- Rosslyn Bentley
- Rosslyn Bentley
No comments:
Post a Comment