A Review of Maggie Stiefvater’s “The Scorpio Races”
A Horse of the Water
Fifteen years ago this month, I visited England with some members of my family. One of the strongest memories I have of the country and the vacation overall is when we visited Dartmoor, which looked like an alien planet to me with all the craggily rocks jutting out all over the place. That wasn’t the weirdest thing about the place, though. The weirdest thing was all the wild ponies running around. Yes, there are wild ponies in Dartmoor belonging to no one but the land. If I remember this right, the ponies would get rounded up each year by the locals and would be taken to London where they would be sold for a pound each. This anecdote is probably tangential to this review of American young adult author Maggie Stiefvater’s standalone 2011 novel The Scorpio Races, but if it proves anything, the British sure like their horses. If the novel is set in Britain, which I pretended it was.
The actual setting is a small island called Thisby (which I imagined was off the Scottish coast, but the novel doesn’t make the setting clear) in the early part of the 20th century. The Scorpio Races centres around two young people, Sean and Puck, and their stories are told in the first person singular in alternating chapters (usually). But before I get into the plot, you have to understand one thing: the island is populated with horses that come from the sea. Known as water horses or capaill uisce (as they’re known in their native language, whatever that might be), they come out of the water every October to be raced along the beach for big prize money on November 1 of each year. It’s a brutal race because not everyone, man or horse, survives. The water horses are killers, taking bites out of other horses (or man).
Into this setting, we have Sean, who has won the titular Scorpio Races four times in the last six years. Puck, meanwhile, hopes to become the first woman to race on her ordinary island mare, Dove, in the hopes of winning enough money to buy back her house — which has gone into debt with the island’s big landowner. However, she faces adversity as not everyone is pleased that a woman is racing for the first time. Sean, meanwhile, hopes to win the race, too, so that he can have enough money to buy the water horse that he rides in the race each year from the same wealthy landowner. Naturally, Sean and Puck met while training and start to fall in love, but not without some standoffishness first. And that’s the gist of the plot.
The Scorpio Races is an enjoyable read, and will be most enjoyed by horse lovers, lovers of mythology or lovers of nature. I am none of those things, but I was entertained by it — even if the ending is never too much in doubt. (Think about who has authored this treatment, and you might figure it out well before you open the book.) However, I must say that The Scorpio Races is best read if you don’t think too hard. You see, if you do, you might stop and wonder why teenagers and young children seem to have time to race horses, but don’t have time to, say, go to school or have a job. Speaking of those horses, since they are killers, you may wonder how on earth a dangerous race that usually results in people dying ever got legislated. Beyond that, since these horses do kill and are dangerous, you may wonder why the people of Thisby don’t beat back the horses into the surf than let them roam the island to kill indiscriminate sheep and threaten the odd islander.
However, this is a book for young adults after all, and I suppose that young adults don’t have the critical reasoning yet to really formulate such wonderings when experiencing a piece of entertainment. (I know I didn’t at that age.) So what you get with The Scorpio Races is escapist entertainment and nothing more. The one piece of criticism that I can formulate as a nearly 45-year-old, as opposed to a 15-year-old, is that this is not a novel that needs to be about 400 pages long. The Scorpio Races is stuffed to the gills with all sorts of subplots that don’t go anywhere. For instance, we know that Puck’s older brother Gabe is about to leave the island, but we never really find out why he wants to leave the island, aside from some vague notions that he’s tired of island life — without knowing what part of island life drives him mad.
Another criticism I have is we also know that Puck’s parents were killed and this is brought up as a tantalizing morsel that you think might lead to some kind of big reveal, but, no, we’re never told how they were killed aside from the fact that the water horses may have had something to do with it. Similarly, we do know that Sean’s father was killed in the race, but we never do find out if this was part of Sean’s drive to be a winner each year. There is too much that is left unsaid in The Scorpio Races. It is a book built upon plot and more plot and more plot until the final climactic race — which isn’t every climactic at all, since we all know who’s going to win, right?
At the end of the day, The Scorpio Races is just an OK read. It is mindless entertainment, about as richly rewarding as eating some cotton candy at a carnival — and did I mention that there was a carnival held around these races each year? No? Well, now I have. Anyhow, this is a book that you can’t think too hard about or you might put your brain in mental knots trying to figure out and reason how the world in this world-built novel works. I suppose it’s good enough for the kiddies that might read this. Still, for the rest of us, there is bound to be better horse whisperer stories out there. If thousands of wild ponies roam the lands of Dartmoor, one of them is bound to have a killer story for a book. Maybe a book for adults, even.
Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races was first published by Scholastic Press in 2011.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
