Keeneland Book

From award-winning writer Alyson Hagy comes a novel set at Kentucky's Keeneland racetrack, where the horses run for glory and people stake love and money -- all to win at the sport of kings.

Hagy, a compelling storyteller who has the "same way with language as her characters have with animals" (San Jose Mercury News), introduces Kerry Connelly, a skilled exercise rider who hasn't yet learned that liking a horse doesn't make it faster but loving one means genuine risk. Kerry -- who can hardly remember a day she hasn't put sweat in the saddle -- is more or less healthy, more or less single, and technically broke. She's come back to home turf, the sweet Kentucky bluegrass of Keeneland, one step ahead of her estranged husband, Eric. A trainer fueled by drugs and money dreams, he's got control of Kerry's champion mare, Sunsquall, and has New York loan sharks after them all.

Keeneland may not be much of a haven, as Kerry's shadowy past has not been forgotten. Some people on the backside of the track aretoo proud to take her back without a fight -- Alice Piersall, the massive, hell-for-leather trainer of second-rate horses; Reno, a one-time child preacher who now saves his brimstone sermons for the Thoroughbreds; and Billy, a former lover known for his honesty in a roulette wheel business. Others are determined to make her fall -- bottle-blond Louisa Fett, a rider who has hated Kerry since they trained together as teens; Delvecchio, a showboat trainer who treats his barn girls like stock.

Gossip, gambling, lust, and outright robbery erode Kerry's dwindling fortunes. When Eric returns to make his play, risking Sunsquall to clear his debts, Kerry must find out if her finalcards -- her body and soul -- are enough to save her in this world where little lasts for long except hope. Keeneland, as Hagy tells it, in a haunting voice "as unique and natural as folk art" (The Orlando Sentinel), energizes -- and humanizes -- the carnival chaos of racetrack life.

Publishers Weekly

Even readers who don't give a dang about horses should love Hagy's fresh, funny, brilliantly made and irreducibly twangy debut, whose sassy but chronically unlucky heroine shows us the hardscrabble underside of the glitzy horseracing world--the lives of the itinerant workers who tend to the horses. Practically raised on horseback, 27-year-old Kerry Connolly goes back to her native Kentucky after her marriage to wealthy, abusive Eric Ballard sours. Now "just another saddle-sore working girl boomeranging back to where she came from," Kerry goes to familiar Keeneland Stables with $10,000 she's filched from Eric. She also brings her unshakable longing for Sunny, the racehorse she had to abandon when she fled her marriage. Kerry recovers her old job at the stables, exercising horses preparing to race. Over the course of the novel, she manages to alienate three bosses, sleep her way into trouble, and win and lose $35,000, all the while crafting increasingly hopeless schemes to win back Sunny. Battered, broke and lonely, Kerry is a woman at rock-bottom, but she regards even her most dramatic misfortunes with enough wry wit to ensure her survival. Eking out a living on the fringes of a world that depends on high-stakes games of chance and calculation, Kerry comes to realize that life outside the track is also a bettor's sport. While Hagy mastered concise narrative in her two short story collections, Hardware River and Madonna on Her Back, here the plot tends to amble, and her conclusion lacks punch. Such objections dwindle, however, when measured against the great virtues of her prose, perfectly measured and rich as Kentucky bourbon. Agent, Gail Hochman at Brandt & Brandt. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|