The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

6/8/13
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani - chicagotribune.com
Meredithmaran
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Review: "The Yonahlossee Riding
Camp for Girls" by Anton DiSclafani
'Yonahlossee' struggles to find better footing
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By Meredith Maran
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In conceiving her first, impressive yet flawed novel, 30­
year­old Anton DiSclafani seems to have followed the
standard advice offered to newbie authors to "Write what
you know."
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DiSclafani's protagonist, 15­year­old Thea Atwell, is a
teenage equestrian who grew up in Florida; DiSclafani was,
too. As a teen in northern Florida, where half of the novel
takes place, DiSclafani apprenticed herself to horse trainers
in exchange for riding lessons, and went on to compete in
national horse shows.
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The other half of the novel takes place during the 1930s at the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for
Girls, to which Thea is banished following a mysterious tragedy at home. Between 1922 and
1985, Yonahlossee was a real boarding school where Southern debutantes spent summers
riding and grooming horses, and being groomed to marry wealthy men. DiSclafani's family
had a vacation cabin in rural North Carolina, not far from Yonahlossee.
Consequently, both landscapes in which the book's alternating scenes are set are rich with
known detail. "There wouldn't be as much to be wary of here, at least concerning the natural
world," Thea reflects upon her arrival at Yonahlossee. "Winter came every year and weeded
the animals, the plants. In Florida nothing died, nothing retreated."
Raised on a citrus farm where she and her twin brother, Sam, were home­schooled and
isolated, Thea is stunned by nearly everything at Yonahlossee, and miserably homesick. So her
ability to make thoughtful, mature sociological observations challenges her character's
believability.
"Yonahlossee was where important Southern men sent their daughters," Thea reports. "It
must have provided a certain comfort to these men, locked away as it was in the mountains;
nobody could reach their daughters here. … The South was still a land unto itself, in some
ways it was a land that time had forgotten."
Eventually, Thea finds friendship at Yonahlossee, and forbidden sex, and shame — all
elements of the inciting incident that caused her to be sent away in the first place. This
mirroring is a device that might have succeeded if DiSclafani had used it to lend depth to
Thea's character development; instead the reader is asked to believe what Thea seems to
think: that bad things keep happening to her at the hands (and other body parts) of bad
people. Unfortunately, seeing oneself as powerless and blameless are not winning traits for a
novel's protagonist.
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Something DiSclafani couldn't have known before she wrote this book was that the fame­and­
fortune fantasy of every first­time author would come true for her. DiSclafani finished the
manuscript, and got herself a William Morris agent and, within days, a seven­figure book
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advance.
"Anton's book hits the sweet spot that publishers are constantly looking for," her agent told
the Kansas City Star. "It's a very literary, review­worthy piece of writing with mainstream
potential and accessibility."
This assessment is both the good news and the bad news about "The Yonahlossee Riding
Camp for Girls." In today's publishing environment, sales are king, and writing an "accessible,
mainstream" book can mean reducing characters and plot to middling common
denominators — a safer bet for publishers, but often an unenlightening experience for
readers. It is precisely the "accessibility" of DiSclafani's first effort, combined with an excitingly
promising talent, that makes the novel an engaging, suspenseful read — we don't learn what
caused Thea's banishment until the halfway mark, and the question of its impact on her
adulthood weaves a tightly honed tension throughout the remainder of the narrative.
On the other hand, DiSclafani's well­crafted but plain­spoken prose, verging­on­predictable
plot, and verging­on­unbelievable characters might be more satisfying if they were a bit less
"accessible" and a bit more subtly drawn.
The acclaimed fiction writer Nathan Englander called "Write what you know" "one of the best
and most misunderstood pieces of advice, ever. It paralyzes aspiring authors into thinking
that authenticity in fiction means thinly veiled autobiography."
There's much to enjoy here: clear, concise writing, lushly drawn settings, compelling choices of
time and place. The talent in evidence in DiSclafani's first effort gives us reason to hope that in
her next novel, she'll write what she knows with even greater depth and complexity — an
outcome that seems likely because, as we all do, she'll know more as time goes by.
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
By Anton DiSclafani, Riverhead, 400 pages, $27.95
Copyright © 2013 Chicago Tribune Company, LLC
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