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Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond
by Halimah Marcus
A compelling and provocative essay collection that smashes stereotypes and redefines the meaning of the term "horse girl," broadening it for women of all cultural backgrounds.
As a child, horses consumed Halimah Marcus' imagination. When she wasn't around horses she was pretending to be one, cantering on two legs, hands poised to hold invisible reins. To her classmates, girls like Halimah were known as "horse girls," weird and overzealous, absent from the social worlds of their peers.
Decades later, when memes about "horse girl energy," began appearing across social media—Halimah reluctantly recognized herself. The jokes imagine girls as blinkered as carriage ponies, oblivious to the mockery behind their backs. The stereotypical horse girl is also white, thin, rich, and straight, a daughter of privilege. Yet so many riders don't fit this narrow, damaging ideal, and relate to horses in profound ways that include ambivalence and regret, as well as unbridled passion and devotion.
Featuring some of the most striking voices in contemporary literature—including Carmen Maria Machado, Pulitzer-prize winner Jane Smiley, T Kira Madden, Maggie Shipstead, and Courtney Maum—Horse Girls reframes the iconic bond between girls and horses with the complexity and nuance it deserves. And it showcases powerful emerging voices like Braudie Blais-Billie, on the connection between her Seminole and Quebecois heritage; Sarah Enelow-Snyder, on growing up as a Black barrel racer in central Texas; and Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, on the colonialist influence on horse culture in Pakistan.
By turns thought-provoking and personal, Horse Girls reclaims its titular stereotype to ask bold questions about autonomy and desire, privilege and ambition, identity and freedom, and the competing forces of domestication and wildness.
"The essays are tender, critical, and deeply personal, and the universal themes of growth and belonging come through consistently but, refreshingly, never feel repetitive. Eminently thoughtful and fascinatingly intimate, this goes a long way toward shattering a stereotype." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"All readers, whether they love riding or have never seen a horse up close, will appreciate these essays. This collection not only shares multiple perspectives from the communities of riders and horse fans but also provides commentary on growing up and dealing with both disappointments and successes." - Library Journal
"More than a fun romp through gorgeous prose by some of our finest contemporary writers, Horse Girls is a sublime exploration of the ways horses bring together the physical and the spiritual; the masculine and the feminine. Funny, earnest, sexy and unexpected, this is a book to read by flashlight and pass around to all your old friends." - Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl
"A wild, rollicking ride into the heart of horse country—these essays get at what it means to love horses, in all that love's complexity." - Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
"I loved this book and could relate to so many of the stories it contains. Horse Girls is a book for all, combating stereotypes and casting a shining light upon the incredible bond between human and beast." - Kareem Rosser, author of Crossing the Line
This information about Horse Girls was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Halimah Marcus's short stories and essays have appeared in One Story, BOMB, The Literary Review, Amazon Original Stories, the Out There podcast, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She is the executive director of Electric Literature, an innovative digital publisher based in Brooklyn, and the editor-in-chief of its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, which she co-founded. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in the Catskill region of New York.
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