Emma Deplores Goodreads CensorshipThe Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls Hardcover, 390 pages | close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Anton DiSclafani's debut novel, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, is a painstakingly constructed ode to a young girl's sexual awakening — just ladylike enough to be more bodice unbuttoner than bodice ripper. Like Rumer Godden's classic 1958 novel, The Greengage Summer, this is perhaps one of the classier books a young teen would hide under her covers to read with a flashlight. It features a 15-year-old narrator, Theodora "Thea" Atwell, whose family banishes her to a North Carolina equestrian boarding school in 1930. There's been a scandal. The Great Depression is closing in. Thea describes herself as "a wrong girl if there ever was one." From another girl, this might come across as a plea for sympathy, but this watchful, bold teenager, who begins her stay at Yonahlossee by poking through her new roommates' closets, never seems to seek pity.
She begins the novel convinced that whatever she did — and it doesn't take long to figure out it has to do with sex — was a violation of society's rules. "My character was not what it should have been. Nobody had told me that, but I knew." She is both innocent and fallen. DiSclafani cuts back and forth between two richly imagined time frames and settings. In the past, there is Thea's paradisiacal Florida home with its citrus groves and endless summer. There she rode her pony, Sasi, and hunted for snakes with her slightly older cousin Georgie and her twin brother, Sam, a childlike boy with a gift for calming animals. In the present at Yonahlossee, where the sweet iced tea is addictively "thick and syrupy," and the three stone barns and five riding rings appear as palaces to a horse-obsessed girl, she cautiously adjusts to the camp's complex social hierarchy. Although all the girls wear the same white uniforms of skirts and blouses with virginal Peter Pan collars, scholarship students mix with the upper-middle-class campers, like Thea, and the very wealthy, who, despite the Depression, arrive with ruby earrings or their own champion horses in tow.
Teasing out the details of Thea's tragic secret in flashbacks, DiSclafani introduces a new love interest nearly as inappropriate as the boy at the heart of the original scandal. Her language is formal, almost deliberately stilted — except when it comes to the sex — and her stately pacing as controlled as a horse being led through a dressage competition. As guilty as Thea feels for her transgressions, she's angry with her parents for sending her away, and while she reads their letters for news of Sam, she refuses to answer them. Instead she loses herself in novels (lots of Edith Wharton and E.M. Forster, natural choices for a girl looking for tantalizing undercurrents of sexuality) — and horses, naturally. Like legions of teenage girls before her, the resentful Thea frequently feels powerless, but never on a horse. Not when she's riding Sasi (" 'Yes, yes, yes,' I murmured, in rhythm to his canter.") or the mare she's assigned to at Yonahlossee: "I had all her power harnessed between my legs and hands, beneath me," Thea says. "
I'd never felt such energy, roiling beneath me like a violent wave." Shaking my head over these images, which fairly pant off the page, I thought, what is it with girls and horses? (I don't recommending Googling this phrase at work.) But as someone who spent many a tween hour poring over the novels of Mary O'Hara (My Friend Flicka), Marguerite Henry (Misty of Chincoteague) and Walter Farley (The Black Stallion), I shouldn't have to ask. And even though there were times when I found The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls ponderous, if I were Thea's age, I would retreat to my bedroom and devour this sexy coming-of-age story like a horse with a box of sugar cubes. It isn't marketed as a young-adult novel, and the vintage photograph on the jacket, of a young woman holding a cigarette, might scare off some parents, but The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls has all the hallmarks of a story meant to empower young women; this is where its greatest value may lie. I loved the way DiSclafani, through Thea, captures the sudden, shocking loneliness of sex at a young age: "Maybe, I thought, as he pushed himself into me, it was enough, that [he] would try to understand me later, that right now there was a need and when we were done the need would not exist anymore."
While Thea's motivations would doubtless be described by someone of her era as "urges," they are more complex than that. When she was 15, Thea's mother said to Sam, right in front of her: "Thea's a girl. She doesn't matter like you do." I, for one, can't blame this budding feminist for refuting that statement with everything she's got, even if it means she finds her power — and her glory — in reducing the most patriarchal figure at Yonahlossee to a man lying in the North Carolina dirt, begging her not to stop. and blogs on the MSN Page-Turner books blog. She is the author of the memoir Accidentally on Purpose: The True Tale of a Happy Single Mother. Read an excerpt of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For GirlsThe ingredients of Anton DiSclafani’s first novel, “The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls,” sound as if they’d been plucked from two genres: the young-adult category and the historical romance. Ms. DiSclafani gives us an elite boarding school where wealthy debutantes perfect their riding skills and prepare for the big spring horse show;
an impetuous, headstrong heroine, who often seems like a 1930s version of Scarlett O’Hara; and a mysterious accident that has left one teenager brain-damaged and two others guilty and haunted. In her story there are echoes of “A Separate Peace,” John Knowles’s 1959 prep-school classic about two friends on the eve of World War II, as well as of Curtis Sittenfeld’s more recent boarding school novel, “Prep.” What makes “Yonahlossee” emotionally engaging in its own right — this summer’s first romantic page turner — is Ms. DiSclafani’s sure-footed sense of narrative and place, and her decision to portray her heroine, Thea Atwell, in all her complexity: fierce, passionate, strong-willed, but also selfish, judgmental and self-destructive. By setting the novel in 1930, as America teeters on a financial cliff, and the days of debutante balls and fancy-dress parties seem numbered, Ms. DiSclafani has tried to situate the rarefied world her characters inhabit in a real-life context, even as she gives the reader some well-observed glimpses of the lifestyles of the rich and not so famous.
Thea, we learn at the novel’s start, has been sent at 15 to Yonahlossee, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, because she has committed some undisclosed, mysterious sin. She and her beloved twin brother, Sam, grew up in an isolated, Edenic realm in Florida. Home-schooled by their father — the only doctor around for miles and miles — they would spend their free time roaming the family’s 1,000 acres. While Sam, a natural naturalist, tended to his wild pets (snakes, lizards, squirrels) Thea would ride her pony, Sasi, “and return only as the sun was setting, in time for dinner, without having seen a single person while riding.” She and Sam were best friends and nearly inseparable; their one playmate was their cousin Georgie, who would stop by for the occasional family visit.Needless to say, Thea is not a happy camper at first. Yonahlossee is a school that puts more emphasis on social etiquette and horseback riding than on academics: caring about learning made a girl unpopular, she comes to understand: “It meant you were too hungry, that you sought something unappealing and vague.
It was better by 10 to be charming and witty.” As the new girl, Thea is the subject of considerable curiosity and speculation, and though her family is well off by Florida standards, she realizes that most of her schoolmates — with their jewels and fancy clothes and sophisticated city manners — belong to a very different class. Thea knows, however, that her superb riding skills can win her recognition; she will find herself in competition for year-end awards with a previous champion, the steely Leona, whose family has just lost its vast fortune. These aspects of “Yonahlossee” seem like standard-issue plot points from a tip sheet on how to write a young-adult novel, and Ms. DiSclafani’s portraits of the other girls at the camp devolve into familiar boarding-school types: the nice, popular girl, Sissy, who befriends Thea; the oddball, Mary Abbott, with whom Thea knows not to ally herself; the nosy, bucktoothed Molly; the spoiled Eva, used to sleeping until noon at home;
Happily, Ms. DiSclafani brings more energy to her depiction of the hermetic world of Yonahlossee, giving Thea her own heat-seeking eye for status details. The author also manages to do an agile job of conveying the combination of skill, practice and intuition involved in becoming a top-flight rider, writing with what seems like genuine knowledge and love of the horse world.In the end, much of the novel’s momentum comes from Ms. DiSclafani’s ability to channel Thea’s quicksilver state of mind: her impulsiveness and introspection, her twitches of remorse and her sense of injustice, her almost simultaneous desires to meet the expectations of others and to defy convention. She captures Thea’s first sexual experience — the intense, electrical attraction she felt for a boy at home, whom she knew she shouldn’t be seeing. And she also captures Thea’s accelerating crush on Henry Holmes, the married headmaster of Yonahlossee — a crush she knows is ludicrous, and yet at the same time suspects might, somehow, be reciprocated.