The Hearts of Horses | Molly Gloss | What a delight! Buy for yourself and give as a gift!

The Hearts of Horses | Molly Gloss | Molly won my heart as she did those of the horses she tamed

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The Hearts of Horses

	The Hearts of Horses Molly Gloss Houghton Mifflin, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

What a delight! Buy for yourself and give as a gift!

Molly Gloss's spare prose is just enough to provide deep insight into the lives, minds and hearts of her characters, two and four legged. Martha Lessen is the central point - the center of the circle, her horses' lives, and gradually, the community. If you love horses, the West, history or romance, you'll find much to enjoy here. The characters stay with you long after the last gentle word of this delightful novel. The last novel I enjoyed this much was Water for Elephants. Hearts of Horses deserves the same long slow jog to enduring popularity.

Molly won my heart as she did those of the horses she tamed

This is the story of a young woman who leaves home and takes a job taming horses for the farmers of a remote valley during World War I. It is a very sensitive portrayal of rural life from a woman's point of view and presents a good description of the gentling form of "breaking" wild or untamed horses.

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Authentic and historically appropriate!

A terrific well paced novel that captures the spirit of a countryside in transition. Excellent perspectives from the little heard from horse trainer and even less heard from woman horse trainer. Cowgirl up!!!

A peaceful story in a world at war

This was my first exposure to the fiction of Molly Gloss. Wow! And I mean that in the most complimentary John-Denver-Rocky-Mountain-High kinda way. No, it's not the Colorado Rockies in the sixties, but the mountains of eastern Oregon in the teens, 1917-18 that is. Gloss's story, about a tomboy-ish young woman horse gentler, Martha Lessen, has such a light and sensitive touch in every way that it is hard to describe. I LOVED this book! I didn't want it to end, but when it does end it has a very right feeling, of something beautiful completed. I'm not going to summarize the story; look up top if you want that. Hearts of Horses brought to mind other books I've read - Winter Wheat, by Mildred Walker, which was another WWI homefront story with the same kind of peaceful beauty. And Gloss's heroine is re-reading Anna Sewell's classic Black Beauty. When Martha and Henry have what should be a very strange and awkward conversation (but it ISN'T) about what the lives of horses must be like, Black Beauty, of course comes immediately to mind; but so does Will James' western story of Smokey the Cowhorse. And there are similarities too to a more recent book I read and reviewed not long ago called Across Open Ground, by Heather Parkinson - another WWI novel.
This is such a gentle, lovely, calm, PEACEFUL tale set in the midst of a world at war that it seems almost fairy-tale surreal at times, but it's NOT. It is disturbingly real, the kind of real you'd like to walk into and get to know the people, to be their friend, to laugh with them and comfort them - THAT kind of real. I guess it's pretty obvious by now that Gloss's book has made me nearly inarticulate with admiration. Here's a typical sample that rendered me speechless; the book's title comes from this passage in which Martha and Henry talk about the horses shipped overseas to the front -

"... about the terrible plight of the horses over there - how they died on the transport ships from fear and trampling; how they pined with homesickness and consequently took cold or pneumonia and died at the remount depots before they ever got to the front; how they were often starved and thirsty to the point of eating harness or chewing their stablemate's blankets; how as many horses were invalided by war nerves as were killed in battle - their hearts and minds not able, any more than the men's, to bear the airplane bombs and grenades, falling fuses, the shrieks of wounded men and animals."

The Hearts of Horses has, I think, a kind of quiet Quaker sensibility, a plain people quality that cannot fail to touch your heart. I'm so glad I found it. What a book! - Tim Bazzett, author of Love, War & Polio (RatholeBooks.com)

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The Heart of Horses

Very enjoyable reading and was passed on to other family members to enjoy a good, relaxing story. Definately recommended.

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6

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