TOPANGA CANYON

In Bryan’s debut YA novel, a teenage boy adjusts to life on his grandfather’s ranch and takes a stand against animal cruelty.

Matt Barrett, a 14-year-old, finds himself on a bus from Chicago to Los Angeles; sent away by his alcoholic mother and her abusive boyfriend, Matt goes to stay with his grandfather Silas Phillips and help out on his ranch. Unhappy even before he arrives, Matt soon grows utterly miserable. Silas is stern and unaffectionate and puts him to work mucking out stables. Matt’s days are long and tiring, and there’s no phone reception. His only true friend on the ranch is the housekeeper Esmerelda Montoya, whose cooking enchants everyone and whose Native American Tongva heritage seems to afford her a deep connection to the land. As the weeks pass, Matt starts to feel more at home and bonds with some of the horses. Working as a stable hand, he is assigned to help Robert Sinclair, a callous trainer who leases barn space at the ranch. Sinclair cares only for money, and employs brutal, illegal practices when preparing his horses for show events. Matt is shocked, but the ranch is in financial trouble and Silas doesn’t want to hear about what Sinclair is doing. Can Matt end the horses’ abuse without ruining his grandfather’s livelihood? The prose is straightforward but elegant (“He stared at the traffic. It flowed like the liquid mercury in Mr. Rocker’s science class, cascading down the pass in its shiny liquid form, fast-moving, unstoppable, poisonous quicksilver”), serving both to relate the story and to capture the simplicity of life on a working ranch. Matt makes for a relatable protagonist: His family life is tough, and he is justifiably self-pitying until the change in his environment brings out the best in him. The plot moves slowly but unfolds in a natural, rather appealing fashion; Bryan takes time to describe things like different horse gaits and to detail the building of a sweat lodge to build the novel’s world, grounding the narrative in a sense of place and adding weight to the revelations of animal cruelty. Readers both teenage and adult, horse-loving and horse-ignorant, should find themselves heavily invested in Matt’s life on the ranch.

A gentle and compelling coming-of-age story.