Kick the Latch

A slim 144 pages on the life of Sonia, a horse trainer who travels the country. It's based on real interviews with one woman, but is marketed as fiction. Sonia has a rough life, but her distinct voice and the brief chapters that hop around in subjects made the book unputdownable. It's like nothing I've read before. Despite so many painful events, Sonia remains objective and realistic about life's ups and downs. From jockeys' traditions to her time as a corrections officer, it's a story that will stick with you.

My family has been involved in horse racing for decades: trainer, hotwalker, exercise rider, groom, jockey, and social worker serving the backstretch, and I'm a lifelong horsewoman in a different discipline. I'm always leery of racetrack stories, as so many of them get so much wrong (Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule was thrown across the room as a travesty). This one gets it right.

It's a small book, a series of short chapters in which a veteran racetracker named Sonia simply talks about episodes in her life with horses and in horse racing. Terse, often brutal, sad, yet also filled with wonder and acceptance, perseverance and bravery, violence, and kindness. From bush tracks in Iowa to Churchill Downs, Sonia does whatever she must to stay show more in the business, doing all the work herself. She feeds, she cleans, she scrubs, mucks, grooms, medicates, rides, trains; she sleeps in her car or a spare stall or a cheap motel, hugs and loves her charges, all with the clear-eyed sense that horses will always come and go, some win, most don't, they die and break down; the lucky ones may end up as riding horses in fancy barns - where they're drugged and bought and sold just the same. The people are treated worse. And yet, after a terrible crash on the track leaving Sonia with multiple injuries, the very people who demeaned and harassed her take her in and nurse her till she's back on her feet again. What Sonia reveals is how the track is all-consuming: it is not just a job. It is literally your entire life, an exclusive community that only other racetrackers understand. Although this is a work of fiction, it all rings vividly true. With the possible exception of the issues of race and immigration that shadow the racetrack backstretches: most of the workers are Latino, and a large proportion of them are undocumented. Sonia and/or Scanlan simply don't go there, and I have to wonder why.

Thank you, Kathryn Scanlan, for letting Sonia tell us her story. I know those people. There are more like them in Willy Vlautin's Lean on Pete, Forest Ormes's The Far Side of Redemption stories, and the ones I tried to honor in my own Scratched. Honest, authentic. She gets it right. (less) show less

Probably for a very specific audience of horse girls who wanted to be jockeys at one point or another, this is more a short series of vignettes that take the general shape of a life, rather than any sort of truly cohesive narrative. But since it's built from interviews with a woman who spent half her life on the racetrack, both the content and the rhythm of its language are fascinating. CW for mentions of assault, but rest assured nothing here is described -- the prose is frank about everything with a spare, pragmatic tone that skips over details in favor of the swift pace.

A perfect read on the subway. Got a couple of questions about the book from strangers on the train and I think my favorite part of this little book was being able to describe it to strangers and watch their expressions turn to curiosity. The vignettes were poignant, the author left out just enough detail to trust their audience and allow us to paint the picture of the missing details, which I really enjoy. I love when an author doesn’t find it necessary to belabor their audience with dialogue queues — no who is speaking, how they said it, what their tone is… thank you, Kathryn Scanlan, for trusting us to find your pacing.

Fantastic little endeavor.

I really enjoyed this spare little book. Less than 120 pages.
Took me into a world that felt new to me.
Quite compelling.

A short read.

Really enjoyed the anecdotes. Don't care if it is fiction or memoir turned fiction, all the horse facts shared in the book checked out, and I am moved!

Good read. Yes.

interesting read
reads like nonfiction surprised to get the fiction tag
short, concise, pithy, truthful
a lot else!!