Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Horse
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Charlottesville
STATE: VA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Goucher College, B.A.; Hollins University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and poet.
AWARDS:Lizette Woodworth Reese poetry award, Goucher College Kratz Center for Creative Writing; Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize, Academy of American Poets.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Talley English is a Virginia-based writer and poet. She studied at Goucher College, where she pursued her interest in creative writing. There she earned the Lizette Woodworth Reese poetry award from the College’s Kratz Center for Creative Writing. English went on to complete an M.F.A. from Hollins University and also received the Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.
English published her debut novel, Horse, in 2018. Teagan French is happy with her life, attending high school and living on a beautiful farm in Virginia. She frequently rides horses, plans campouts with her best friend, Grace, and uses any excuse to eat outdoors. Her resolute mother, Susanna, is also a horse lover. However, her brother, Charlie, and father, Robert, are a bit distant with her. The only thing that seems out of place in Teagan’s life is Robert’s increasingly odd behavior. One day he comes home with a new male horse and subsequently abandons the family to live with another woman. Teagan welcomes the horse and names him Ian. She starts attending an equestrian-focused boarding school several hours from home so as to change the normal routine of her life as her family falls apart. She has a new set of friends and fresh environment to help her get past this family drama. But most of her time is spent trying to train the stubborn Ian, who becomes a crutch for her recovery.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly took note of the “short, punchy chapters.” The same reviewer concluded that “English is a talented writer whose strong, striking sentences compensate for the weaker aspects of the story.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor opined that the sparse style English employs gives Horse “an oddly distanced quality; none of Teagan’s relationships have much emotional force, with the notable exception of her complex bond with Ian.” The Kirkus Reviews contributor found the novel to be “very well written but alternately predictable and jarring.” In a review in School Library Journal, Georgia Christgau called it “a shining debut for coming-of-age collections focusing on promising young authors.” Christgau said that the novel is “recommended for serious readers and animal lovers alike.” Reviewing the novel in the Shelf Awareness website, Bruce Jacobs claimed that “Horse is no National Velvet. It is a sensitive story of a young girl coming to grips with her broken family–and yes, a horse helps her find her way.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of Horse.
Publishers Weekly, June 11, 2018, review of Horse, p. 40.
School Library Journal, July 1, 2018. Georgia Christgau, review of Horse, p. 79.
ONLINE
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (July 5, 2018), Bruce Jacobs, review of Horse.
TALLEY ENGLISH received the Academy of American Poets' Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Talley English received her BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Creative Writing from Goucher College. She is a recipient of the Lizette Woodworth Reese poetry award from Goucher College’s Kratz Center for Creative Writing. She holds an MFA from Hollins University, where she received the Academy of American Poets’ Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize. Talley’s mother first put Talley on a pony, named Snowball, when she was two years old, and she continued riding horses for the next twenty-three years, until she began writing more often than riding. She feels that she learned about herself through riding, much in the way that storytelling requires a translation of human emotion into writing. Talley lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her family and a dog.
Horse
Publishers Weekly. 265.24 (June 11, 2018): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Horse
Talley English. Knopf, $26.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-101-87433-2
In English's uneven debut, high schooler Teagan French lives an idyllic life at Blue View, her family's Virginia farm. Her days consist of riding horses; campfires in the woods with her best friend, Grace; and outdoor dinners under cloudless skies. Teagan lives with her mother, the strong-willed, horse-loving Susanna; her older brother, the kind but distant Charlie; and her hard-to-please father, Robert. However, Robert seems less like himself every day. When he brings home an obstinate new gelding, Obsidian, and then abruptly leaves his family for another woman, Obsidian is christened Ian and given to Teagan. As her family crumbles around her, Teagan chooses a new path for herself at an equestrian-focused boarding school a few hours away. She deals with pain and heartbreak there with a new cast of roommates and friends, all the while battling to train the strong-willed Ian, hoping to find something she can truly trust amid the turmoil. With short, punchy chapters and both first-and third-person narration from Teagan, the novel moves well, but the story can feel unfocused; scenes of boarding school antics are highly detailed, while major moments--like the abrupt and dramatic ending--are vague. English is a talented writer whose strong, striking sentences compensate for the weaker aspects of the story. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Horse." Publishers Weekly, 11 June 2018, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542967285/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f53dd52a. Accessed 17 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542967285
English, Talley: HORSE
Kirkus Reviews. (May 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
English, Talley HORSE Knopf (Adult Fiction) $26.95 8, 7 ISBN: 978-1-101-87433-2
English's debut views a girl's coming-of-age through the lens of her relationship with the thoroughbred her father leaves behind when her parents split up.
It's the summer before Teagan starts high school, and tensions between Robert and Susanna French are evident--and skillfully rendered from the anxious, bewildered perspective of their daughter--even before he moves out to live with another woman. Teagan decides to go to a girls boarding school with a riding program not far from the family's home in rural Virginia; that way she can get away from her shellshocked mother without cutting herself off entirely. She navigates the social complexities of her new environment while grappling with Ian, a headstrong, "seasoned foxhunter" bought to assuage Robert's midlife crisis and not the easiest horse for an adolescent girl to handle. Short, brooding first-person interpolations from Teagan many years later suggest that things are not going to turn out well in the main narrative, which appears to take place in the late 1980s. Indeed, even as Teagan develops a rapport with Ian, her new friendships are faltering, her schoolwork is slipping, and her mother is worried enough to send her to a psychologist, caustically dubbed "the vampire" by Teagan. English's stripped-down prose works well to convey Teagan's increasing alienation as she decides not to go back to boarding school and pulls further away from her father after he announces he's marrying the new girlfriend. But this spare style also gives the novel an oddly distanced quality; none of Teagan's relationships have much emotional force, with the notable exception of her complex bond with Ian--which makes the impulsive decision that triggers the denouement all the more jolting. It doesn't seem to fit what until then has been a fairly typical coming-of-age tale, and an epilogue set in Arkansas is simply baffling.
Very well written but alternately predictable and jarring.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"English, Talley: HORSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294121/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c5d902dc. Accessed 17 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294121
ENGLISH, Talley. Horse
Georgia Christgau
School Library Journal. 64.7 (July 2018): p79+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* ENGLISH, Talley. Horse. 336p. Knopf. Aug. 2018. Tr$26.95. ISBN 9781101874332.
When Teagan, the 14-year-old protagonist of this fine debut novel, shops for two cats at the local animal shelter with her older brother Charlie, she asks to see the felines on "death row." "We want something that doesn't care about people," she explains, choosing a shy tabby missing half an ear and a tomcat with no teeth. Thus Slinky and Gums join a menagerie of horses and dogs living in Virginia at Blue View, a few acres that Teagan and her family are hanging on to, just barely. The members of this household love animals but can't communicate with one another. When Robert, the father, abruptly walks out, he leaves his thoroughbred gelding Obsidian, nicknamed Ian, behind. Robert's absence greatly impacts Teagan and her mother, Susannah. Teagan's mastery of the willful Ian progresses even as she flounders, unable to let Robert back into her life when he settles nearby. Slowly Teagan learns to trust her instincts about Ian--and herself. Constructed as a series of vignettes, this quiet, restrained novel downplays emotional catharsis, allowing teens to read between the lines, much like Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. VERDICT A shining debut for coming-of-age collections focusing on promising young authors. Recommended for serious readers and animal lovers alike.--Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY
KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre | Tr Hardcover trade binding | lib. ed. Publisher's library binding | Board Board book | pap. Paperback | e eBook original I BL Bilingual | POP Popular Picks
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Christgau, Georgia. "ENGLISH, Talley. Horse." School Library Journal, July 2018, p. 79+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545432466/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7141fbcd. Accessed 17 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A545432466
Shelf Awareness for Thursday, July 5, 2018
Book Review
Review: Horse
Horse by Talley English (Knopf, $26.95 hardcover, 336p., 9781101874332, August 7, 2018)
A girl in her early teens, a punchy thoroughbred horse and a father who leaves his family for a younger woman--a familiar tale. In the able hands of Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize-winner Talley English, however, this scenario plays out with sensitivity and the graceful prose of a poet. Her first novel, Horse, takes place in rural Virginia, where Teagan French lives with her brother and parents on a farm with a menagerie of horses, dogs, barn cats, occasional adopted geese and other stray critters. In this seemingly idyllic family life, Teagan struggles to find her place in the world--taking long horseback rides on the old pasture horse Zepher, with her mother alongside on the docile mare Duchess.
No surprise, the French family is not as mellow as it seems. Teagan's father is a high school principal nursing a midlife hankering for a fast horse, a sports car and an erotic fling. Until he abruptly leaves, he's largely just a weekend fix-it kind of guy, "even though it always made him angry in the end, or at the beginning, depending on how complicated the thing was." Teagan's mother is a preschool teacher, horsewoman and the rock of the family, who can "nurse a horse, take care of cats and dogs, and a house, and a farm, and two children." Obsidian (nicknamed Ian) is her father's impulse buy: a 16-hand thoroughbred gelding trained for freewheeling fox hunt jumping. Charlie is the typical older brother with his first driver's license and an attitude.
When Zepher has to be put down, Teagan begins to ride Ian even though he is too much horse for her. If she can't have her father, she can at least have his horse. Sensing Teagan's increasing detachment, her mother agrees to send her and Ian to a nearby boarding school with a highly regarded riding program. Together, Ian and Teagan become a working team--"removed from the turmoil of her house, the unsettling absence of her father, her brother's interminable silence, her mother's sad face and pretense that life was going on as usual."
English knows too much to end this girl-and-her-horse tale with a wall full of show ribbons and a neat family reconciliation. In one of the first-person chapters set in the future, Teagan rummages through boxes of childhood detritus with the clarity of maturity: "There isn't enough time to go back in time... what I want is to move on, to move forward, and also to take a shower." Horse is no National Velvet. It is a sensitive story of a young girl coming to grips with her broken family--and yes, a horse helps her find her way. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.
Shelf Talker: In an accomplished debut novel, poet Talley English captures a family coming unraveled and leaving its teen daughter to find her way with the help of a stalwart thoroughbred.
FacebookTwitter