A Horrible, Good Book: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

“This book is good, but horrible,” said my friend as she handed me The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls to read.  I've read the book now and I know what my friend meant.

Riverhead Books/Penguin Group, 2013
390 pages

Fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell has spent her life protected from the rest of the world.  The Atwell family’s world is isolated and insulated in rural Florida in 1930, yet they are happy.  Thea lives with her parents and twin brother, Sam, with occasional visits from her uncle, aunt and their son, Georgie.  These are the only people she interacts with.  She rides and jumps her pony for hours each day.  The twins are home-schooled by their physician father and get to spend most of their days outside exploring the acres surrounding their home.  Yet disaster approaches this paradise.

The book begins as Thea is sent away from her family to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, a riding school for rich southern girls in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, because of a horrible incident in which she plays a central role.  Thea is desperately homesick for her bucolic life in Florida, but she resigns herself to her situation because of the guilt she feels for what happened in her family. 

Thea eventually grows to love the school.  Here she is able to continue her equestrian passion of riding and jumping, as well as her other passions.   As Thea deals with people and happenings at the camp, she begins to develop some insight into herself, the events of the past and what she needs in life. 

Thea is both victim and “Lolita.”  She was like watching a train wreck unfold.  At the end of the book, Thea describes her teen-age self, “I wanted everything….I was a girl, I learned, who got what she wanted, but not without sadness, not without cutting a swath of destruction so wide it consumed my family.  And almost me.  I almost fell into it, with them.  I almost lost myself.”

The book moves back and forth in time as the story of what happened in Florida slowly unfolds.  DiSclafani doesn’t sugarcoat the events.  Her descriptions are real, I felt like a voyeur at times.  I wanted someone to step in and stop the downward spiral, but as in life, events lead to other events and each has a consequence— sometimes with tragic results.   

I don’t know that The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is a likable book, but it is an engrossing one.