Sex, drugs, abuse—yes, that’s the darker side of the horse industry—any walk of life to be honest. We choose what we want to be a part of, even if you have had a life that created the spiral. The key element is what choice to you want to make. And that is where House Rules gets it. The main character starts to realize where she is, what is going on and the ending, which if this is a real experience, I’ve never heard of this happening, comes to a very real and sobering reality. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9701 Ocr_module_version 0.0.10 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000168 Openlibrary_edition

This book is incredibly hard to get through not just because of the graphic violence and abuse, but because of the very real emotional fallout of the abuse. The main character, Lee, not only suffers brutal abuse from the adults who are supposed to protect her (many of them are also enabling it) but her narration reveals that she feels like it’s something about HER, that it’s her fault, which is gut wrenching.

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It's a really dark, lonely sort of book. I don't know how to explain what I mean. It just left me sort of lost- but her writing was really good. The fact that nobody has any deeper biographical information from her.. It's like she's faded away from history. It took me a long time to find out what I know about her, from bits and pieces. Nobody else seems to think about her anymore. If you don’t have a problem with the context of the story, it is a very interesting read and very, very well written. Aside for a few things, I wish Miss Lewis had stayed with the world. I think she would have given a voice to many like her. Lewis's third and final novel, published posthumously, is as dark and gritty as her 1994 debut, House Rules The rest of the story passes with scenes in hotel rooms, stables, schooling rings. Abuse and drugs, over and over again.. it's a cycle that never ends, and the author wants you to experience this cycle.. and how it feels to be trapped within it. Warning: If you are looking for a book about horses and showing, this is NOT it. This is not the type of feel good, under dog winning the championship type of book. This is a book that shows the horse industry —that other aspect of the industry—that we know exists. And it’s graphic. Very, very graphic.

As Aristotle pointed out long ago, we enjoy good representations in fiction of things we would not enjoy at all in real life, whether Oedipus stabbing himself in the eyeballs, or in Lee’s case, what it would feel like to mount a horse after being fisted. I cannot imagine wanting to be a bottom, but can see in being a sexual passive a form of misplaced spirituality, a wrong turn in the path to what Ignatius designated as the third level of humility - perfect identification with Jesus’ suffering. But tho’ some of the blurb descriptions of this book make it sound like a work of Lesbian S/M erotica, I did not find that @ all. The sex scenes seemed more descriptions of extreme unarmed combat or OTT hazing @ a very bad fraternity or military school. The very heavy drug use in the novel represents a Dionysiac spirituality, as in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. (I’d known from my hospital experience the Dilaudid was the good stuff, but now I know why & that you can use it to control both horses & riders.) Like some other favorite characters, Lee is both extremely tough and very vulnerable. She doesn’t know how to recognize or repay generosity, yet she has an enormous capacity to endure abuse while retaining her personal dignity.NOTE: I didn’t include any plot spoilers, but if you’re a “less I know the better” kind of reader, I would wait to read any further.** I do wish we knew more about the main character: How did she start riding and how she got into the show scene, because the level she is showing is not an easy place to be. You need money—even as a catch rider, you need money and you need to be good enough to have a name that people want you showing their horses. Affiliation with a barn sure, but you need to win, and win a lot. So, right there, the level of this character’s skill is a bit frustrating, because as the writer does take you through moments of riding at the shows, they are of someone who is skilled. The book begins with the narrator, Lee, facing expulsion due to being caught with pot and a bunch of boys (sound familiar?). As a result, she has nowhere to go but doesn't want to go home to a father who sexually abuses her and a mother who helps him do it. Lee manages to travel to the horse circuit after making her friend repay a drug debt, and on her way there, she is molested by a man who is her seatmate. Through this we begin to see how Lee copes with the way others treat her. Lee appears as a character who is honest and loyal, but can't get herself out of situations that will hurt her. It seems as if she doesn't have the strength or ability, but maybe it's because the pain helps numb everything in the end. She's a character who's very human and I found her relatable, despite us having little in common. I admire Lee. Sadly she only believes what happens to the horses is wrong, and could not understand the same was happening to her until the very end.

Next, we have a lot of unanswered questions about some main characters: Carl is alleged to be married, but we never hear of the wife, any history of the wife, other than 2 references. Even when the main character, Lee, stays with them in between shows, the wife is never even alluded to, but many other characters have their stories and history laid out up front. Confusing.

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Her writing style encompasses everything I love and revere in a writer - a simple, heartfelt honesty that is the hardest thing to achieve. The book also shows us a network of adults who are too interested in passing judgement and making money to care about the treatment of the horses and riders, and women’s reputations take a much bigger hit than their male peers who are doing just as much (usually more) depraved stuff. This all adds up to a perfect storm for poor Lee to get trapped in an unsafe dynamic, even without the copious drugs she’s being given. It's a deep and dark story, and what makes it work is the mystery of the show-jumping world. Not all of us are familiar with it, so there's a certain elusiveness. The story truly conveyed emotion and pain- when I read about the abuse Linda and Carl set their horses through, an example being a car battery used on a water jump, it gave me a very lonely and discomforting feeling. This book only makes me wonder- was there really someone like this, people who did this, and if so.. what happened to them? The situations are so odd that they feel real to me, but Heather can't answer these questions for me now. I wish she could. She does an excellent job of exploring the line between pain and pleasure in her work, and the relationships of those who walk it. urn:oclc:37246883 Scandate 20111208100831 Scanner scribe5.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) Lccn 95069748 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL819130M Openlibrary_edition