The Scorpio Races

by Maggie Stiefvater

[paperbackjedi]

Puck Connolly would do anything for her family. When they fall on hard times and her older brother plans to peace out and leave her and her little brother high and dry, she decides to take a crazy risk and enter The Scorpio Races with her family horse, Dove. She’ll be riding against the dangerous, but far superior water horses that everyone else rides. She’s the first girl to enter and the first person to do so using an ordinary horse, making her a target. Sean Kendrick watched his father die in The Scorpio Races, but he still enters every year and wins almost all the time. His intense relationship with his own water horse and the ocean itself makes him an outcast on the island. Told from altering perspectives, Puck and Sean fight for the things they love the most– maybe even at the cost of their lives.

The Scorpio Races is pure magic. It’s such an interesting premise and even though the world is just one small island, it’s crafted into an epic setting for the story. Sporting a small cast of critical characters, it paints an intimate picture of each person found within the pages. Both Sean and Puck are excellently rendered protagonists, but detail is spent on many of the island’s inhabitants and their own histories and personal connection to the races. I also particularly enjoyed Puck’s younger brother Finn as a character. The best thing about this book is by far the prose and the fact that this is not a love story, it’s a story about the ties that bind and how you best protect them. AND MAGIC HORSE RACING. Because that’s just awesome. I will warn you that the language is oddly formal, but it works well with the delivery of the story and makes sense within the world-building.

The plot itself moved at the perfect pace– nothing happened too slowly and when there wasn’t much action, there was stunning character development and inside looks at the lives and personalities of Thisby’s population. Stiefvater plays close attention to detail, describing events and personalities with grace and sophistication. Particularly notable, was her description of the water horses and horse riding in general. You can tell how much she researched in order to write this book and it shows in how well she is able to relay the racing aspects of the story. And while you are definitely on the edge of your seat when the action happens, you’ll most likely be tingling from the anticipation of the event and how it affects the characters and their relationships rather than the sporting aspect.

Truly, the heart of this novel is the relationships– and I mean all of them: the relationships between family, between a boy and a girl holding their own, between a human and a wild animal, and between a town and its population. There is so much love in this novel that it overflows in every page and it’s not simple, feel good, instant, and shallow love. It’s complicated, complex, and bone deep. It’s in every choice and action they make. If you’re looking for banter and bickering and a typical boy meets girl, you’ll be disappointed and so will I because you’ll have missed the point and, honest to blog, a hell of a story.