The Scorpio Races

The Scorpio Races is a young adult novel that bears some similarity to The Hunger Games, in that it is built around a competition that can be deadly. But instead of being political in nature, it is more grounded in emotion and a connection to nature.

I hadn't known, before reading this book, that there is a mythical creature known as the water horse. Celtic in origin, author Maggie Stiefvater has given them the ability to run on land and be tamed, to a certain degree. On an island that would appear to be off the coast of Ireland, every year on the first of November a race takes place, with mounts on top of water horses. The winner gets a lot of money, but there's a good chance of mortality, as water horses are carnivorous.

This is a well written novel, but at times I got impatient with it. Again, I'm reminded of The Hunger Games because we wait and wait until the competition, but in The Scorpio Races the race is wrapped up in one chapter. Instead their is a slow and inexorable relationship brewing between the two narrators. One is Sean Kendrick, who has won the race several times. He's a groom for the richest man on the island, who owns all the best water horses, and Sean has formed an attachment to the best of them--Corr. He wants to win the race so he can buy Corr from the owner.

The other narrator is Kate (Puck) Connolly. As the novel begins, her elder brother announces he is moving to the mainland. She then finds out that the family is a year in arrears on her house. She will be the first girl to ride in the race, but will do so on a regular horse, a small mare named Dove, who everyone mistakenly thinks is a pony. Everyone thinks she's nut to do so, but she needs to win to save her house. Another factor--she hates water horses, because her parents were killed by one.

The best thing about the book is the way Stiefvater sets a sense of place. I imagine the fictional island of Thisby is meant to be like one of the Aran Islands, or perhaps an island off the coast of Scotland, a remote place where everybody knows everybody. I'm not sure what the time period is meant to be--cars are rare: "Cars are never a good sign. Not many people on the island have them, and fewer still have a reason to come out here. Usually the only people who come this way are men who don't take off their hats as they hand over unpaid invoices."

And though the overall tone is somber, like the gray skies of an Irish November, there is a droll sense of humor: "Dory is what Mum used to call a 'strong-looking woman,' which meant that, from the back, she looked like a man, and, from the front, you preferred the back."

Though the romance between Sean and Puck is inevitable, I liked the way Stiefvater handled it. Indeed, she has structured her plot so that both our protagonists need to win the race, and we're not sure who to root for. But the ending makes perfect and logical sense.

The trouble I had with the book is the water horses themselves. I struggled through the first third or so of the book understanding the difference between them and regular horses, other than that water horses ate meat and could swim. Can they breathe underwater? Do they look different than horses; i.e., do they have webbed feet,fins or gills? They can be tamed, but, as we learn in one scene, they can come ashore and menace the local population. It would seem they are like lions or tigers in some respect, but I couldn't fully grasp their danger.

Still, this is a fairly good novel that at times plodded but at other times really sang, especially in the race chapter. "What it's like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It's the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It's speed, if you're lucky. It's life and it's death or it's both and there's nothing like it."