The Hearts of Horses: A Novel

REVIEW by Kelly Andersson for the MissoulianMartha Lessen was a tall girl – big-boned and rangy like a horse, but also graceful and handsome like a horse. She not only wore men’s pants, she wore fringed batwing chaps and a big wide-brimmed hat. Taller than most women and a lot of men, she struck an imposing figure. Didn’t say much. Slept in the barn. Kept to herself. But the young woman’s work with horses and her gentle ways made her a hero to all the local kids, who saw her as a friendly incarnation of the Old Wild West broncobuster cowboy.She did own one dress – a corduroy jumper. And she wasn’t averse to wearing borrowed party shoes or a fringed scarf offered by her employer’s wife.“She had been to a fair number of dances in her life, from a wish not to be thought entirely eccentric.”In the winter of 1917, with the war just under way, 19-year-old Martha Lessen shows up at the doorstep of an eastern Oregon rancher. She’s looking for work. For horses to break. Many of the men in the county have gone off to Europe to fight, and George Bliss hires her on.In those days, the “help wanted ads” were at church on Sunday; after a while George and his wife take Martha with them to church, where he explains to his neighbors that Martha does good work. She melds quickly but quietly into the ranching community, and rides a circuit every day from ranch to ranch, breaking the owners’ horses to saddle.In those days, it wasn’t common for women to travel the countryside breaking horses. But in those days, it wasn’t unheard of.Many of the chapters in Molly Gloss’s book The Hearts of Horses begin with “in those days.” Reading the book is a lot like listening to your grandma tell you a story about “back in those days.”Except for a few horse-related gaffes (basal hackamore, McClelland saddle, and “him” the mare), Gloss’s use of language is deft. She manages to weave in terms – a woman’s hair in a psyche knot, or a weal instead of welt – that were common in those days, without making the language laboriously historic. I didn’t know that a singletree was called a whiffletree, but it was.The connections between horses and people are well crafted yet subtle. Gloss doesn’t beat the reader over the head with them; they just ease themselves into the story. Martha Lessen, the broncobuster “horse whisperer,” shows up in Elwha County with a badly scarred mare, burned and disfigured in a fire. Gloss doesn’t have to point out that Martha herself is some scarred from her past. Many of the other horses in the story have parallels with the people around them.Some of them have great names. There’s a paint called Paint. But then there’s a little beauty of a palomino called Maude. The foreman of the ranch where Maude lives suggests to Martha that the little mare might hold her head up more if she had a pretty name.Gloss’s voice in the book is a storytelling voice – it’s a book to enjoy reading slowly, to savor the way the words sound – or to read aloud to someone else at bedtime.Gloss doesn’t mess around with long paragraphs of description when just a couple sentences will paint a picture of the day.“The weather turned colder, the ground frozen so hard it rang under the horses’ feet. The sky on Christmas Day was Chinese blue, brindled with long streaks of dry cloud.”Gloss’s writing is lean, spare prose – much like the people of the real Wallowa County, and certainly very much like the folks who lived there in 1917.“No one had told Martha that Tom Kandel was sick. He had lost a good deal of weight over the past few months but she hadn’t known him long enough to notice it. He had a thick shock of brown hair that hung down over his forehead, and in the cold whitish daylight he was slightly flushed with one of the fevers he’d been running off and on for days. If you didn’t know, you’d have thought he was bright with health. He was forty years old and in a little over two months he would be dead.”Though lean and straightforward, the book’s matter-of-fact language manages to vividly convey life in wartime on an eastern Oregon ranch.Henry Frazer, the foreman on the ranch owned by the spinster Woodruff sisters, is tasked with creating the holiday eggnog for a pre-Christmas party. Eggs were hard to come by, cream was hard to come by, sugar was not to be had, and except for a few moonshiners, the county was dry. But Henry was a resourceful sort.“It was not a lack of liquor that kept most people from making eggnog that winter, it was the sugar. But for years the Woodruff sisters had been experimenting in their garden with various plants their neighbors said wouldn’t grow in the valley, and they had a grown a crop of sugar beets in the summer of 1917. Now that the country was on a wartime footing the Woodruffs had sugar while others were going without. There was no easy way to separate the molasses from the sugar crystals though, so the Woodruffs’ sugar was black. Aileen’s chocolate cakes took to it easy, but Henry Frazer’s eggnog, floating in a silver punch bowl with a grating of orange nutmeg, was the color of snuff, and people had to be persuaded to drink it.”After the first round, though, people quit teasing him and went back to the punch bowl on their own.The parallels between the horses and the people in the story are gracefully woven, and Gloss with just a few sentences can convey a bushel’s worth of personality. Sitting in the kitchen with the Woodruff sisters, Martha learns the story of Aileen’s encounter with a man who beat his horse with a length of pipe for refusing to cross a bridge.“Now don’t imagine that I just stood there and watched,” says Aileen. “I took that piece of pipe right out of his hand. I cussed him, too, and I believe I might have hit him with his own pipe if I hadn’t been with Mrs. Stuart, who turned about the color of buttermilk when she heard what I said.”Martha Lessen knows horses. She knows their hearts. She believes that, of the millions of horses sent over to Europe during the war, more would have survived if they’d been allowed to stick together with their horse friends – the horses they knew from home – and they wouldn’t have become homesick and lonely, and they wouldn’t have been so afraid. That same belief is the current that runs like the Little Bird Woman River through The Hearts of Horses – through the people in the valley of eastern Oregon.============================================

A beautiful book, and one I re-read with pleasure. The author's voice is direct, clear, and spare. Her characters are so real and so unique. Molly Gloss is one of my favorite writers.

Martha was truly a woman before her time. Such a wonderful character.

I bought this book when it was a bargain price for my kindle. I'm glad I had a chance to read it. I was not sure it was a genre I would enjoy and I did! The parts about Tom and his wife filled me with emotion and I felt a personal connection to those parts. The words were so true, no matter how hard they are to admit. I like how Martha weaved in and out of these people's lives as their horse breaker and later, their friend. It was heartwarming to witness Martha evolve into a personable "lady" throughout the story. Overall, it was a touching story to read. I did find some story lines dragged a bit which made me give it 4 stars over 5. I would recommend this book to my friends if they are looking for a meaningful read.

I totally loved this book. It took place around 1917. You will not be able to put this book down. You will fall in love with Martha!!! Fabulous story.

Our book Club really enjoyed reading this book. It was an easy read and the story was well researched for the time, area, the horses and how the main character worked with each horse and engaged with their owners.

This book is worth reading as a nice, easy ride through a section of Martha's life. Wanting more from it may be more a reflection of my Type-A, overachiever personality in contrast to her laid-back, easy-going outlook. She is a woman I would like to know who has no ambitions to change the world, but a personal determination to gentle horses in a way contrary to popular, male-directed tradition. She just does it. No soapboxes. No confrontations except in the face of brutality. No proselytizing or rallying to her cause. Somehow I believe that the others she meets in this book responded much more receptively to her ways because she didn't do these things but showed them it worked. Ms. Gloss touches on the social position of women in this era and that position's total dependence on the men in their lives. Ms. Gloss also does that in a gentle way, just telling it like it was without adding a feminist backward-looking slant that seems to creep into so many works of our day. I enjoyed this book.

I really loved this book. In a day when we can't describe anything without a curse word or a vulgar remark, this little book was such a ray of sunshine. It describes life as it was in the early 1900's, but it is written with a great knowledge of that time and the language of civilized people.The story was very interesting and held my attention through to the end. There were a few surprises, but mostly it just made my heart happy. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever loved a horse, and to those who have missed that joy.I thank the author for giving me a book I can recommend to friends and family, young and old.