“This summer’s first romantic page turner.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Named a most anticipated book for Summer 2013 by The Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly and USA Today, NPR, and People summer reads pick
From the author of The After Party, a lush, sexy, evocative debut novel of family secrets and girls’-school rituals, set in the 1930s South.
It is 1930, the midst of the Great Depression. After her mysterious role in a family tragedy, passionate, strong-willed Thea Atwell, age fifteen, has been cast out of her Florida home, exiled to an equestrienne boarding school for Southern debutantes. High in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with its complex social strata ordered by money, beauty, and girls’ friendships, the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is a far remove from the free-roaming, dreamlike childhood Thea shared with her twin brother on their family’s citrus farm—a world now partially shattered. As Thea grapples with her responsibility for the events of the past year that led her here, she finds herself enmeshed in a new order, one that will change her sense of what is possible for herself, her family, her country.
Weaving provocatively between home and school, the narrative powerfully unfurls the true story behind Thea’s expulsion from her family, but it isn’t long before the mystery of her past is rivaled by the question of how it will shape her future. Part scandalous love story, part heartbreaking family drama, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is an immersive, transporting page-turner—a vivid, propulsive novel about sex, love, family, money, class, home, and horses, all set against the ominous threat of the Depression—and the major debut of an important new writer.
From the Hardcover edition.
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“What makes
Yonahlossee emotionally engaging in its own right—this summer’s first romantic
page turner—is Ms. 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. By setting the novel in 1930, as America teeters on a
financial cliff, and the days of debutante balls and fancy-dress parties seem
numbered, Ms. DiSclafani has tried to situate the rarefied world her characters
inhabit in a real-life context, even as she gives the reader some well-observed
glimpses of the lifestyles of the rich and not-so-famous…By cutting back and
forth between the events that took Thea to Yonahlossee and her experiences in
school, Ms. DiSclafani methodically builds suspense, making the reader wonder
how Thea’s two romances will unfurl, and whether they will dovetail or collide…The
reader’s attention rarely wavers, thanks to Ms. DiSclafani’s knowledge of how
to keep her foot on her story’s gas pedal, and her sympathy for her spirited,
unbridled heroine.”
—
New York Times