Richie's Picks: RIDING INVISIBLE: AN ADVENTURE JOURNAL by Sandra Alonzo
and Nathan Huang, ill. Disney/Hyperion, March 2010, 240p., ISBN:
978-1-4231-1898-5
"Conduct disorder is a psychiatric category marked by a pattern of
repetitive behavior wherein the rights of others or social norms are violated.
Symptoms include verbal and physical aggression, cruel behavior toward people
and pets, destructive behavior, lying, truancy, vandalism, and stealing."
-- from Wikipedia
"Nights on the Triple R
inside Tavo's trailer
I can feel the stars shift
and I am shifting too
we sleep against black and purple
where protective clouds cover the sky
and I stain the air on my paper
with art pencils and pens
a new self-portrait emerges
Yancy leaning against Shy
alone
in the night
pale moon
invisible desert
reflections on my
buckskin's
beige coat
Tavo's out front
sensitive and seasoned
he must know about life
I paint his eyes
sad and knowing
I think he's
our guide"
Twenty miles outside of Palmdale, California, on the evening of Day Five
of running away from home on his beloved horse, Shy; two days since he got
seriously banged up falling off of Shy and into a ravine; and a day after
getting robbed in a park of his last nineteen dollars; fifteen year-old
Yancy Aparicio is out of food, out of alfalfa pellets, and seemingly out of
luck, when he reluctantly pulls out the scrap of paper and calls the phone
number given him by the stranger -- Tavo -- who'd approached him and his
horse outside of an IHop and had offered him assistance. The story that Yancy
comes to know -- of Tavo's own life-threatening journey from a village in
Mexico where his wife and kids live, to becoming the hard-working hand for a
wealthy southern California horse breeder -- will prove inspirational and
instructional to this teenager who is the "good" kid in a dysfunctional
family.
Yancy has left home because his well-meaning parents have been unable to
control his abusive, mentally disturbed older brother, Will, who has already
harmed Shy and now covertly threatens to kill the horse. Being an
aspiring young artist, Yancy writes the complicated story -- of his family's
struggle with Will's conduct disorder, and his own life-changing journey away
from home -- in a journal format accompanied by his drawings and poems.
There are quite a number of recent children's and YA novels about
characters who are not neurotypical, or about a character who has a sibling who is
not neurotypical. For the most part, the mentally-challenged characters in
these stories are extremely sympathetic and we can easily come to feel
empathy for them and for similar people we may subsequently come to meet in
real life.
But author Sandra Alonzo has in some ways crafted a more-challenging tale
here, in the sense that it is no easier for us as readers to come to terms
with Will's beastly behavior than it is for Yancy to do so. We so easily
share Yancy's terror regarding the things Will has already done in the past
(some of which Yancy is the only one in the world to know about) and Will's
potent threats. It becomes clear to us that the parents are an educated,
intelligent couple who have been seeking out and trying to utilize expert
advice. So what is to be done in a family situation such as this, and how
might readers find empathy for such a scary, cruel, utterly unsympathetic
character as Will, even if we recognize that he has been born with a disorder?
Despite such weighty questions, RIDING INVISIBLE is also a fun and
spirited adventure with animal love and first kisses and cool drawings, rather
than being a one trick pony about evil and despair. This is a great horse
story and coming of age tale that I'll be talking up to seventh, eighth, and
ninth graders.
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
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FTC NOTICE: Richie receives free books from lots of publishers who hope he
will Pick their books. You can figure that any review was written after
reading and dog-earring a free copy received. Richie retains these review
copies for his rereading pleasure and for use in his booktalks at schools
and libraries.
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