The God of Animals: Aryn Kyle

Images Credit: Birdy

Taking a week’s break from the gym is so beneficial. I get to read as soon as I come home from work and there is nothing more relaxing than sitting with a bit of coffee or just enjoying the strong breeze with your nose buried in a book. Thus I finished “The God of Animals” by Aryn Kyle. There is 12-year old Alice Winston who helps her father with his chores at the ranch. Theirs is a horse farm where they breed and raise horses as well train riders for shows. Alice is burdened with more than just physical labor as she copes with a mother who hardly ever talks and sits alone in her room and a father who has not come to terms with the fact that his older daughter ran away with a rodeo cowboy. The summer after her sister disappears, is a long one, of discoveries for Alice. And then everything comes to a head at the end of that long, dusty summer.

Ok, before I go forward with my thoughts on this book, I have a curious question. Why is it that ‘things happen’ in summer? Is it the heat? Does it muddle people so much? Count the number of books that have been set in summer. There are two books already reviewed in Lifewordsmith – The Summer of Katya and Love and Summer. There are two on my TBR shelf – Summer by Edith Wharton and Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner. If I run a random search am sure I will find tons more. Perhaps I should also run a search for winter books.

Anyway, it was one such magical summer where things did happen for Alice. She outgrew her clothes, she saw her father almost fall in love with another woman and she discovered she had a crush. But there was one thing that eluded her – herself. Alice covers up her loneliness through a few white lies and pursuing a telephonic friendship with her school teacher, Mr. Delmar, who she is convinced is her true love. Alice is so stirred up by the stillness around her that she yearns for danger and excitement along the way to figuring herself out.




Kyle writes with a hand that perfectly projects the assured confidence of an adolescent that sheaths myriad self-doubts inside. It’s not an easy task to voice the churning, conflicting thoughts of that age. Above all the people in the novel though, it’s the horses that stand out. Kyle was brought up in Colorado, the land of horses, and it shows in every sentence. That sometimes becomes the drawback of the novel. There is too much of horses all over and the middle of the book sags with the heaviness of the animals. In the periphery, lie the stories of Alice’s heartwarming yet distanced relationship with her father, her wary closeness with Patty Jo one of the rich clients of the ranch and her friendship with Sheila. These form the tight fence around the horses who rear, gallop, birth and get trained in the middle.

The God of Animals holds your attention enough not to put it down with boredom. There is a strange sense of disquiet that reigns the atmosphere of the book from start to finish, which has you clasped to itself. And Kyle’s fluid, evocative writing helps. It brought the shimmering summer right at my doorstep. Yet, I wish Kyle had made the plot a bit more closely knit and torn off a few pages from the book. That would have made it slicker. But am not complaining that much. Now I am going to get myself some water to quench my thirst after surviving yet another spellbinding summer.


Verdict: Get lost in the dust of the ranch with the horses and Alice.

Rating: 3.2/5