Book Review: The Scorpio Races

Today I bring you a review of Maggie Stiefvater's "The Scorpio Races"....

I found this book to be fabulous - a large part fairy tale myth with a solid dose of reality and angst.  From the first page to the last I was captivated.  Skillfully crafted characters spin out a tale of love, adventure, and lots and lots of danger.

And this book is basically about man killing, man eating horses that live in the ocean.  What's not to love about that? 

The Water Horses come out in the Fall mostly, by all accounts, and are hardly the tame pets one might associate with horses.  These beasts are wild and uncontrollable.  And every year, inhabitants on this little island try and tame them and race them. 

And so this story unfolds the lives of three main people - Puck, a young girl struggling to figure out her place, Sean, a young man chaffing against his current situation, and Gabe elder brother to Puck and who wants nothing more then to get off the island.  In fact, Puck only joins the races {the first girl ever to do so} in the vain hope that it will keep her brother from going off island.

Interwoven with these interpersonal stories are the horses and their stories.  The crazy, half-magical ways the islanders use to tame them, the viciousness of the animals themselves, and the respect one would have for any large beast.  But Sean is different, he's like the Horse Whisper.... he knows things about the water horses that no one else knows.  And he can control them like no one else can.  And so he, this final time, risks everything he holds dear to enter the race.

There's lots of action in this book, coupled with lots of details that can, at times, seem quite tedious but are necessary to understand what is happening in the plot.  Admittedly this story might be easier to understand if you like horses &/or have some knowledge about them.  There are quite a lot of details, but I feel like they all come together to shape a wonderful story.

I really enjoyed this book - it sucked me in from beginning to end.  I even eschewed my tasks at work so that I could read some more.  The ending was quite nice and satisfactory, and it leaves me hanging just enough to hope that there might be another book that carries on.  But, that's not a requirement. 

So go and check this book out at the library - I hope you'll like it as much as I did.

Peace & Love,