FICTION
“The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls”
By Anton DiSclafani
Riverhead Books, 390 pages, $27.95
The 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. 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.
What makes “Yonahlossee” emotionally engaging in its own right — this summer’s first romantic page turner — is 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.
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 , 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.”
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 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 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; and so on.
Happily, 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 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.
By cutting back and forth between the events that took Thea to Yonahlossee and her experiences in school, DiSclafani methodically builds suspense, making the reader wonder how Thea’s two romances will unfurl, and whether they will dovetail or collide. Some of these developments may feel like plot twists from a sepia-toned soap opera, but the reader’s attention rarely wavers, thanks to DiSclafani’s knowledge of how to keep her foot on her story’s gas pedal, and her sympathy for her spirited, unbridled heroine.
