The Outside of a Horse

by Ginny Rorby
Hennepin County Library audioCDs 7 discs
read by Emily Bauer
genre: YA coming-of-age, horses, war

This story was almost ruined for me by the reader. Her voice was too girlish and peppy (to fit the 13-year-old protagonist) for me, but she also varied her volume so much that I missed parts or had my ears blasted. I was constantly changing the volume as I listened in my car.

The title comes from an old English proverb (which I listened to three or four times before I heard it): ‘There's nothing so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse.’ Hannah's mother died from cancer when she was nine, her dad is fighting in Iraq, and her stepmother wants her to help with baby Jeffy. Hannah escapes to the nearby ranch to watch the horses and ends up being an unpaid worker there.

Once I got into the story and got over the narrator's voice bugging me, I really enjoyed this story. The horses, her dad's recovery, her growth as an adolescent, . . . Very nice. I would have liked it better when I was young and in my own "horse" phase. Her dad's transformation was the best part of the story.