The Risen Horse
Isabel Chavez is a young teenager living on the Mescalero Apache reservation in 1905; her mother has just died, her brother is hanging out with other guys and playing cards all day, and her father literally sits on the town fence, too deep in his grief to notice what his daughter and son are up to. Coping with her own grief, Isabel turns to what she loves most: horses. She has an innate talent for training “un-rideable” horses, and the Indian agent finds her skills valuable and pays her well. Very quickly, though, her life will change drastically: her father is persuaded to send her back East to a Pennsylvania boarding school for Indian children from all the nations to help them adapt better to their new world. Isabel is eager and curious, though wary, and her new life at the Carlisle School while strange at first, begins to grow on her, as do her new girlfriends.
Written with a simple, straightforward style that suits the teenage characters, The Risen Horse is an engaging story with a sympathetic heroine — we start to care very early about what’s going to happen to Isabel, and how she’s going to manage in that strange world of white people back East. Basically, she does just fine — and when she comes back home to New Mexico for the summer, it gets even better.
This is the second story about the Chavez family; Taschek’s earlier book, Horse of Seven Moons, portrayed Isabel’s father — then known as Bin-daa-dee-nin, now just John Chavez — as he fought the losing battle against the U.S. government and ended up living on the reservation. Taschek has written thirteen other YA books, all having to do with horses and teenagers — a winning combination!
