Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race
Lara Prior-Palmer
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race
Lara Prior-Palmer
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
It's a good story, but one that, in the hands of a less talented or more self-glorifying writer, could easily have become an unbearable book. It's easy to imagine an endurance-racing memoir filled with nutrition-gel meals and competitive fury, capped by a bit of victorious gloating. It's equally easy to imagine an overly sanitized book, all landscape description and no saddle sores. Thanks to Prior-Palmer's excellent prose and rigorous honesty, Rough Magic is neither. Instead, it's an unusual pleasure to read.
Prior-Palmer writes with grace, giving a measured, reflective account of the race she was unprepared for but still won.
... a stunning debut.
Lara Prior-Palmer’s Rough Magic, a tale of seven days spent traversing the Mongolian steppe on wild ponies, courts symbolism as much as any, while also rejecting the arc of the traditional journey, such that myth melts into and is enlivened by the teeming, sometimes petty details of life itself.
Coming-of-age storytellers take note: here is your model heroine. Across time, adolescents have sought to define what they are by first defining what they are not. Lara Prior-Palmer canters away from the known world and all the expectations of her it contains.
First-time author Prior-Palmer transforms from hopeless 19-year-old underdog into surprising champion...in this exhilarating, visceral account of her attempt to win a 1,000-kilometer horse race across the Mongolian countryside.
[A] gripping, self-searching, triumphant debut memoir.
Prior-Palmer presents her leap-first, look-later character as impetuous, often running in unattended 'pixie mode'; she is also 'attached to my exterior of fearlessness.' It seems to be a very specific way of being until you realize, Wait a minute. That’s every teenager..
In this feisty and exhilarating debut memoir, Prior-Palmer smoothly recounts what happened over her momentous week in August.