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Bezig met laden... Kick the Latchdoor Kathryn Scanlan
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. 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 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) 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. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
"Kathryn Scanlan's Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman's life at the racetrack-the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner's circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the "particular language" of "grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody"-with economy and integrity. Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, "I wanted to preserve-amplify, ex- aggerate-Sonia's idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self." Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track"-- Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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reads like nonfiction surprised to get the fiction tag
short, concise, pithy, truthful
a lot else!! ( )