Reviews for White Horses

The average rating for White Horses based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-05-17 00:00:00 Morgan Doyne Teresa's family is highly dysfunctional. Her mother Dina ran away with her father King when they were both relatively young but the marriage was full of disappointments and eventually her father walks out on them. Dina's father told her stories of Arias when she was younger, men who are wild and restless. Dina's obsession with the romantic and mysterious Aria and her search for them led her to run away from home with King and to continue searching for one late into her life. Dina's idealization of this fantasy was one she passed down to her children, telling Teresa and Silver these tales as they grew up. The men in the story sound an awful lot like Teresa's brother Silver with his dark looks and ruthless attitude, one encouraged and loved by Dina. Teresa can't see anyone else but Silver who is the epitome of male perfection to her and as things in their lives get more tense Teresa starts to fall into mysterious bouts of sleep, not walking up for hours on hours. I actually really liked this one by Hoffman though I don't want to think about what that says about me. I personally don't mind reading things that are uncomfortable and so the whole incest thing wasn't a big deal. I can see why other people may have not enjoyed the book but I did because it was pretty different from anything else I've read. I personally liked the lyrical writing and the way things bordered on the mystical/magical but at the same time I do think the way the story unfolds isn't very unrealistic. Dina's own fixation on this idea of a person causes her to raise her children to be who they are and it makes perfect sense that Silver becomes a living version of that ideal and that thus Teresa becomes fixated on him. I do think that Teresa and Silver don't necessarily love one another, I think it's more that Teresa has been taught to want a certain type of man and Silver to be that type of man. Silver seems to want to be with Teresa after everything else in his life starts to fall apart and it seems more like he seeks her out of validation than love. It was clearly not a healthy relationship and Silver did take advantage, he was older and revered by his mother so there was the power imbalance. I think the whole point of the story is that ideals are far removed from reality and that people aren't perfect. In the end Teresa does let go of the Arias and her past. Also people sleeping so they don't have to deal with their lives is a thing that happens so her sleeping sickness really wasn't that mysterious, it seemed more like a coping mechanism that happened much more often when she was upset.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-29 00:00:00 Ronald Maxwell This book will take some time to digest. It's called a book hangover. For some reason when I first glanced at the description, I took it as a fantasy story where the main character was chasing her brother, Silver through her dreams. I was wrong and I was right. I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I had known it was about a small town, dysfunctional family. I don't usually read books like that. Real life is depressing enough. Half way through, I very nearly gave it up. I am so glad I didn't. There are many themes in the book, love versus passion, fantasy versus reality, overcoming grief, growth. At what point is a person too old for fairy tales? Is giving up those fairy tales the same as losing hope? Or is it only a matter of finding something better? Something more meaningful? It's a lot to take in. It's a lot to think about. I still don't know how I feel about it. It's been said in every other review, but I suppose I'll say it again. Alice Hoffman's writing is beautiful, lyrical, poetic. Even when dealing with such awful subjects as drugs and incest, she somehow managed to make it beautiful. You could hear the crickets chirping in the moonlight, feel the summer breeze blowing off the river, the chill of early morning fog. The story is driven relentlessly on by the never-ending drama. Just when you think it can't get worse for Teresa, just when you think Silver can't get more awful, just when Dina finds happiness, something happens. It gets worse. The characters fall lower then they ever have before. Unfortunately, Teresa and Dina seem to be the only ones who find redemption, and even then, you could argue that Dina never found it. She was better in the end, but not as good as she could have been. Not enough to pull her children back from the edge. It was too little too late. She loved herself more than she loved her children. Going so far as to actually speak out loud or write down which ones were her favorites. Just the same, Dina's story tore my heart out. This won't be a story for everyone, and that's certainly understandable. If you could appreciate nothing else in the book, it certainly gets you thinking, and sometimes it takes an uncomfortable topic to do so. Those topics abound. Incest is the most prevalent, but drugs, alcoholism, prostitution, and abuse of women are also contained within the pages, and at times were worse than the incest. Still, I think if one can get past the discomfort of it all, this book is well worth reading and pushing through to the end. I did feel like some story threads were left incomplete. What was the deal with the necklace and Harper? Whatever happened to King Connor and Reuben? What happened to Dina's mother in New Mexico? These loose threads left me with a sense of unfinished in my mouth, but ultimately it was Teresa's story and I suppose it ended where it needed to. Thank you to Open Road Media and Net Galley for providing me with ARC in exchange for an honest review.