Horse

Horses link childhood aspiration, popular storytelling, and family memory in the novel. They appear less as individually depicted animals than through the human worlds built around them: a beloved horse book, riding lessons and barrel racing, a commercially successful rodeo series, and a metaphor for Elfrieda Von Riesen’s distinctive handwriting.

Reading and the threshold of adulthood

As a child, Yolandi Von Riesen is absorbed in The Black Stallion. Elfrieda, carrying a book in her army backpack, tosses it into Yolandi’s lap and presents it as the next step after the horse series. The gesture makes the books’ horses part of a transition: a cherished childhood obsession is not dismissed, but framed as something from which a different kind of reading and life can begin.

Riding and the rodeo ambition

Yolandi has also recently begun horseback-riding lessons with her friend Julie. She imagines becoming the third-best barrel racer in the provincial Under Thirteen category, which has only three members. The smallness of the field gives the ambition a comic edge, but the lessons and the specific competition make horses more than a literary fascination: they are part of a youthful identity she is trying on in the world beyond books.

Horses in Yolandi’s writing life

Years later, the rodeo world becomes the basis of Yolandi’s work as a novelist. She has written nine books in the Rodeo Rhonda series, featuring barrel racers and broncobusters. The books have done well enough to help pay the mortgage and buy groceries at the house on Warsaw Avenue, giving the horse-centered stories a concrete role in her family’s former economic life.

That success is changing. Yolandi’s publisher believes the series must move on because more teenagers live in cities and may not relate to rodeo competitors. The publisher is willing to wait for a tenth Rodeo Rhonda while Yolandi works on a literary book. The shift from horses as the material of a dependable series to a subject her publisher considers less relevant marks a change in both the imagined audience and Yolandi’s writing career.

A family image of motion

Horses also enter the family’s language through the description of Elfrieda’s handwriting. In the letters and cards she sends to Will and Nora, her separate-coloured inks and distinctive script recall horses racing toward a finish line. The comparison conveys speed and movement while attaching those qualities to Elfrieda’s acts of care: her messages encourage the children to be brave, enjoy life, and know that she loves them. Across the book, the horse thus connects youthful aspiration, the work of making stories, and an expressive trace of family affection.