Sunday, January 29, 2012

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

Wow, Wow, Wow - I feel like that is all I have been saying lately but it happened *again*...I fell in love.  This is like nothing I have read in a long, long time.  I have attached a New York Times review for the synopsis because lets face it they are paid to write better than me (or is it I???)  This part is just where  I gush and profess my love for this author and this book.  She has created this place, Thisby, that is both familiar and other worldly - it is fantasy without being too fantastical (yeah not even sure that is a word.)  There is adventure and love and loss.  Which brings me to her characters - Puck and Sean - their love story made my heart skip a beat without being overdone or too teenagey (now there's a word.) I am not a horse person perse, but this book may have changed that. 


New York Times Book Review

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

The Ride of Their Lives

Maggie Stiefvater’s violent, stand-out fantasy, “The Scorpio Races,” is set on the fictional island of Thisby, in either a near past or a dystopian future where there are cars and radios but no mention of television or the Internet. Here, young men are drawn to the barren beaches of the Scorpio Sea each November to compete in a brutal race astride capaill uisce (CAP-ul ISH-kuh), commonly known as water horses.

THE SCORPIO RACES

By Maggie Stiefvater
416 pp. Scholastic Press. $17.99.(Young adult; ages 13 to 18)
Stiefvater, most recognized for her “Shiver” werewolf romances, not only steps out of the young adult fantasy box with “The Scorpio Races” but crushes it with pounding hooves. Adapted from Celtic legend, the meat-eating mounts of this inventive, tightly woven tale have the ability to lull their human riders into a stupor whereby the fairy horses can then carry them back to the ocean to be devoured.
The two likable and well-realized main characters have been born and raised in this rough and isolated but tightknit island society. Kate Connolly, or Puck, as she is called, has already lost both her parents to the capaill uisce. Now her older brother Gabe is threatening to leave the island, and the only way Puck can keep her impoverished family intact is to enter the Scorpio Races and win the pot.
Sean Kendrick, another orphan and locally lauded for his ability to calm the capaill uisceshares Puck’s fierce determination. Sean works for the callous owner of Thisby’s largest horse yard; he has ridden Malvern stables’ champion stallion Corr to victory in the last four races. Now 19-year-old Sean is ready to call his life his own.
Two sides of the same coin, their stories told in alternating first-person, Puck and Sean both love Thisby and its horses. Yet Puck embodies forward-looking progress in challenging her beloved islanders’ exclusion of women racers, while Sean looks to the ancient pagan traditions surrounding the water horses as a way to preserve what is best in Thisby. This chasm engenders a romance, born of mutual respect. But of course, both riders can’t win, and this tension drives the novel to its bloody but satisfying conclusion while leaving the stall door open for further installments.
Stiefvater’s descriptions of the small island community, from the gossipy butcher shop to the sacred hush of the Malvern stables, are poetically rendered and steeped in a belief system that feels entirely real. The pull between the island’s pagan past and it’s seemingly Catholic present creates a well-constructed metaphor for teenagers struggling to understand current frictions between religion, politics and pop culture. The islanders’ fight to maintain their heritage even as their economy lags behind the mainland’s — and of the Americans who show up to watch the races — also feels relevant to those suffering the effects of recent financial upheaval.
If “The Scorpio Races” sounds like nothing you’ve ever read, that’s because it is. Thecapaill uisce are exhilarating, frightening creations, far more fascinating in their quivering, carnivorous rage than lovelorn vampires or angsty fallen angels, the current paranormal darlings of Y.A. literature. Stiefvater has successfully plumbed lesser-known myths and written a complex literary thriller that pumps new blood into a genre suffering from post-“Twilight” burnout.
Jennifer Hubert Swan is the middle-school librarian at the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School. She blogs at Reading Rants.

Review by 
4.18 of 5 stars 4.18  ·   rating details  ·  4,885 ratings  ·  1,472 reviews
It happens at the start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die.

At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them.
Puck Connolly is different. She never meant to ride in the Scorpio Races. But fate hasn’t given her much of a chance. So she enters the competition — the first girl ever to do so. She is in no way prepared for what is going to happen.

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