Animal instincts upend sentimental ‘Yonahlossee’

Riverhead Books, $27.95, 400 pages

At the start of “The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls,” Thea Atwell is the kind of sheltered, self-involved 15-year-old who gets teased by her peers for being “too solemn” — but that’s the least of her worries.

Set in the summer of 1930, Thea has been expelled from her wealthy Florida family and escorted to a secluded North Carolina boarding school where heiresses learn to ride horses. Anton Disclafani’s ambitious debut novel takes its time in exposing Thea’s transgressions involving her twin brother and cousin, but it’s clear after a few chapters that the heroine is no naive babe in the woods. She’s more a calculating vixen in training, fearless on horseback and quick to go prowling through her cabin mates’ closets when nobody’s watching.

As the shadow of the Depression begins to touch this mountain sanctuary for Southern debutantes, the first third of the book advances at a dreamy, sometimes dawdling pace — then jumps to a surprising gallop at the midpoint. Disclafani, an Emory graduate and previously a competitive equestrienne, knows her way around a stable. She renders with precision the tedium and extreme devotion required in caring for horses.

For riding novices, the narrative proves more compelling when detailing the complicated social strata of Yonahlossee, from Thea’s discomfort around the help (dirt-poor mountain locals who turn down beds and pour baths) to deciphering the motives of pretty Leona, the Texas oil princess who becomes Thea’s rival. In a funny aside, we’re told that the gossipy Atlanta girls “were big-city, walked around camp with their bobbed hair and painted fingernails …. as if everyone was watching.”

But who is watching, exactly? For such a keen observer of social customs and lapses, Thea can be both painfully self-conscious and oblivious to her classmates in ways that are, at turns, fascinating and exasperating. The book’s first-person narrative gives voice to Thea’s capriciousness and sentimentality but allows for tone-deaf proclamations such as, “I was still more child than adult. I was not a monster but a confused, wronged girl.”

Next to Thea, the other girls sometimes blur together, a parade of debutantes dressed in “white skirts and blouses with Peter Pan collars.” No wonder Thea’s thoughts regularly turn back to Florida and the slow build of events that led to her eviction from the family’s Edenic estate.

The author isn’t shy in trumpeting her literary influences. In a recent podcast presented by Washington University, where Disclafani received an MFA and is now a writer in residence, she mentions reading Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” for insights into building suspense. Clearly, that novel’s academic setting and fraternal twins inform this plot. Thea confesses to loving books in which “someone makes a mistake and pays the consequences,” name-dropping Henry James, Edith Wharton and Thomas Hardy. Ovid’s Narcissus also gets a nod, as does Agatha Christie.

Early on, though, “The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls” feels light years removed from the fussy worlds of Wharton or James and closer to a curious Young Adult sub-genre: the coming-of-age novel involving horses. Memories of 1935’s “National Velvet” or even “The Horse Whisperer” by Nicholas Evans come to mind. Like a plucky Young Adult protagonist, Thea has a tendency to make grand, telling statements such as, “It is a simple thing, to love a horse,” or the cringe-worthy, “I came of age, as they say, at the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls.”

Just as the reader is ready to lump this book alongside, say, Mary O’Hara’s “Flicka” series, the narrative makes an unexpected tonal shift from show-pony potboiler to steamy pulp romance. Thea’s oblique confession that she “knew about fast girls from books” turns out to be a half-truth at best. An improbable and wholly inappropriate fling with a much older man adds danger and adrenaline to the second act. The animalistic passion of the sex scenes offers some relief from the grim tidings of financial collapse, news that interrupts the camp’s sense of security. Sadly, the purple prose used to illustrate these lustful encounters falls short of the lyrical fluency seen elsewhere in the novel. “Fifty Shades of Grey” it’s not, but such passages are certain to set the tongues wagging in book clubs across America.

Even more troubling is how the affair ends up being inconsequential, inserted as if for an inevitable movie version and not fully instrumental in Thea’s self-proclaimed “coming-of-age.” On a similar note, a briefly anticipated equestrian competition between Thea and Leona at the book’s climax would make for chills on screen, but it reads as almost routine on the page. The contest sets the story up for a final act of self-sacrifice performed by a major character — another device that Hollywood demands.

Thea’s handling of the finale feels, to borrow a word from her classmates, oddly solemn. It’s a far cry from the vivacious, unpredictable and sometimes infuriating protagonist who has pushed the novel’s plot like she pushes her horses — with spurs and whips, past the point of exhaustion, perhaps, but always fearlessly forward.

Like our heroine, the reader eventually exits “The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls” haunted by the setting’s charms and mesmerizing flavors. But unlike Thea, we’re not entirely eager to return.