I am none of those things, but I was entertained by it - even if the ending is never too much in doubt. The Scorpio Races is an enjoyable read, and will be most enjoyed by horse lovers, lovers of mythology or lovers of nature. Naturally, Sean and Puck met while training and start to fall in love, but not without some standoffishness first. 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. However, she faces adversity as not everyone is pleased that a woman is racing for the first time. 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. Into this setting, we have Sean, who has won the titular Scorpio Races four times in the last six years. The water horses are killers, taking bites out of other horses (or man).

It’s a brutal race because not everyone, man or horse, survives. 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. But before I get into the plot, you have to understand one thing: the island is populated with horses that come from the sea. 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). 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. If the novel is set in Britain, which I pretended it was.

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 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. Yes, there are wild ponies in Dartmoor belonging to no one but the land. The weirdest thing was all the wild ponies running around.

That wasn’t the weirdest thing about the place, though. 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. Fifteen years ago this month, I visited England with some members of my family.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater