Review: 'White Horses' by Alice Hoffman
Pub. Date: 9/23/2014
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
A powerful and haunting story about the seductive allure of fairy tales and the freedom that comes with waking up to reality
When Teresa sleeps—sometimes for days at a time, the scent of roses surrounding her—she dreams of the Arias, outlaw riders on white steeds, who roam the desert at night. She was told about the dark-eyed horsemen by her mother, Dina, who left her own bedroom window open at night in the hopes that one would take her away from her parents' house in Santa Fe.
Teresa, who cannot find a cure for her mysterious sleeping sickness, has one true ally: her brother, Silver. Wild and handsome, Silver exerts an irresistible force over everyone he meets—women especially. He pursues a life of crime and danger, and the older he grows, the more reckless he becomes. Teresa wants to break free but is drawn back to her brother again and again, pulled by the belief that he is the night rider of her dreams. Only when she realizes that she has the strength to save herself will she finally be able to open her eyes and walk away.
A lyrical blend of the mythical and the real, White Horses has been hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as a book that “will reverberate in readers' imaginations for a long time.”
I was enchanted by Alice Hoffman's book Property Of, her first novel which centred on a toxic relationship, which I read in 2014. I was younger then, a good 8 years younger, and was gripped by the danger and the fire of that story. Now I'm almost 29 and dangerous and reckless love has a very different pull on me. I still recognise the enchantment of it, feel the pull of it, but my brain is older, more experienced, wiser. That perhaps explains my very different responses to Property Of and White Horses. While reading the latter I was again utterly lulled by Hoffman's lyrical writing, but once I put the book down the consequences of it all crashed down on me every single time. To be clear, I don't think that Hoffman would have preferred my (slightly wide-eyed) response to Property Of, I do not at all think she is in anyway in favour of toxic relationships. The narrative she weaves in these books, with all the naïve talking points of 'I can save him', 'he can save me', 'if not him I'll be all alone', is one that only slowly unravels but when it does it all comes undone. Whether her narrative in Property Of was too subtle or if it's simply a book that stays relevant on re-reading, I don't know. But I can imagine that, like Property Of, White Horses isn't for everyone. While beautiful, White Horses is a hard read full of confronting scenes. It is a truly messed-up fairy tale in which a happy ending often seems impossible.
Teresa lives in a world of magic, especially when she sleeps, which is often. Her mother raises her on stories of the Arias, wild men on wilder horses with fire in their eyes, who swoop in to enchant and save young girls. And all Teresa sees when she thinks of those stories are her brother Silver. And so her mother's disappointment in her own life warps Teresa's view on men and her role in the world. As she grows into her teenage years, life becomes intricately more difficult and traumatic as Teresa tries to find a way out of her dreams and away from her sleeping sickness. Teresa is like a fairy tale princess, but only in the way that she is a sheltered and dreaming girl in a much crueler world. The adults in her life do not prepare her for the hardness of the world, in part because they themselves were never prepared and have been crushed as a result of their own hopes and dreams. White Horses therefore almost feels like a tale of generational trauma, a tale of undoing not just your own trauma but also that of those who came before. While White Horses switches perspectives frequently, Teresa is at the heart of it, always. And she was very close to my heart by the end of it.
Alice Hoffman truly writes unlike any other. The word 'lyrical' truly is a perfect descriptor for the way Hoffman moves between the fantastical and the truly real in her stories. Reality blends into myth, myth into legend, and legend into the lodestar for reality. What truly stuck me about White Horses was the way Hoffman so perfectly encapsulated this circularity, that fascinating way in which we mythologise real life trauma into a "story" that then guides us for the rest of our lives. I recognise this because I had to undo some of those created myths through therapy in order to start making better and healthier choices. Coming from that perspective, the perspective of a girl in love with stories who suffered from that love, White Horses had a deep impact on me. Teresa is so young and so indoctrinated that it becomes hard to see what is being done to her and what she chooses. That is where part of the tragedy lies in White Horses, that Teresa has never had the chance at a moment of clear and free thought, a real moment to choose where her life is going to go. And so countless of tragedies befall her, although tragedies is a mild word. I've put quite a few trigger warnings into the tags because many things happen and the way they happen is hard. While Teresa may not see some of the things that happen to her as things that have been done to her, that is very much the realisation an adult reading this book has. And that is difficult because all you want is for her to be free. But there is something cathartic about White Horses as well, about confronting the part of yourself that is also blind to danger as long as the danger comes with love. Hoffman definitely did it again with White Horses.
I give this novel...
4 Universes!
White Horses is a hard book that deals with difficult topics and won't be the right read for everyone. But if you can read through to the message of Hoffman's story, it is an incredibly rewarding story.
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