Shelf Talkers Anonymous

Rating: Good Read

I quite enjoyed Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver series (though I still need to read Forever), and while they were well-written and interesting (who would have ever thought of people turning into wolves in the winter?) I didn’t love them as much as I was hoping I would. Grace and Sam were a little too teenagery for me, and a little too easily in love. Their lives are difficult, but the amount of stress and tension that their relationship went through didn’t always feel justified. Puck and Sean in The Scorpio Races however, are racing for their lives and their freedom, and the bond that develops between them is deeper than a teenage first love, and stronger than anything Grace and Sam can muster.

Maggie’s newest book takes place in modern times on a small island that is home to the legendary and frightening water horses: horses that come from the sea craving blood and flesh for a meal. These horses will kill anything: animal or human. And every year in the fall when the water horses begin to emerge from the sea, the people of the island capture some of the horses to race them. The race has been going on for centuries, passed down from generation to generation. Sean has won the race four times already, but he has never won for himself. Now he wants to race to win his freedom—his livelihood and his horse. Puck hasn’t been near the ocean since her parents were killed by water horses. But now with her older brother leaving for the mainland and the big wig of the town threatening to evict them from their house, Puck knows the only way to keep her family together is to enter the race and bring home the winnings. Things are complicated when Puck and Sean form a tenuous friendship. They both can’t win the race, and there can be only one to cross the finish line first…

This book is a beautiful weaving of old myth, friendship, and the modern world. Puck and Sean’s story feels fairy tale and current at the same time. You could almost call this a fairy tale re-telling, except that Maggie has captured so well the essence of what this old story means for today’s readers that the vestiges of fairy tale left in The Scorpio Races is so subtle you almost don’t notice it. There is no evil stepmother or magical midnight spell or beast to turn into a man. There is just these two young people trying to stake a claim for themselves in the world.

I loved that this story wasn’t just about friendship and growing up, but it was also about loving a place and feeling like you belong somewhere. It was about the bond between human and animal, and how strongly that bond can influence and shape us. And it was about family, and the challenges and struggles of loving people but not being able to control what they do. It was about how one person can be happy and another miserable in the exact same situation, and sometimes loving someone means letting them make hard choices.

A far improvement both in story and character over the Shiver series, The Scorpio Races set an exciting precedent for Maggie’s future books. I’m excited to see what she does next.