An engaging tale of a contemporary Navajo girl’s connection to her horse and culture.
A blind Navajo teenager and her thoroughbred head to the Kentucky Derby.
In this debut novel, Moore introduces Victoria Jo Pinto, a blind high school junior living with her brother and grandfather on the Navajo reservation. After Victoria and her brother, Calvin, stop a stranger from beating a horse in a restaurant parking lot, they find themselves the owners of a thoroughbred who loses every race. The family spends time training the horse, now named Victory Jo after her new owner, and Calvin starts racing, slowly teaching the animal how to beat local competitors. Victoria also bonds with the horse, though a riding accident makes her reluctant to take the reins herself. As Victory Jo begins to show promise as a racehorse, Victoria decides to enter the thoroughbred in the Kentucky Derby. A collective fundraising effort both on the reservation and off supplies the entry fee, and a caravan of supporters helps escort Victory Jo to Kentucky, leading the Navajo Nation president to observe that “except for the forced march our people made in 1863, there have never been this many of our people away from home at the same time.” Will Victory Jo finally reach her potential in this Triple Crown race? Moore has lived on the Navajo reservation, and shows familiarity with both the physical environment and Navajo culture. (That experience does not always produce an authentic rendering of the culture; the use of “Medicine Man” instead of hataalii, when Navajo words are used in other instances, is grating.) The plot requires some suspension of disbelief, and readers familiar with horse racing will note liberties taken with the entry process. But Victoria is a compelling protagonist, balancing her heritage with the concerns of a typical teenager, and frequent but minor grammatical and punctuation errors (for example, “the Stalley’s”) do not keep the story from being an enjoyable one.
An engaging tale of a contemporary Navajo girl’s connection to her horse and culture.Pub Date: March 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5141-6301-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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