Scanlan writes about ordinary life in extraordinary ways by compacting it radically, like pressurizing carbon into diamonds. When Sonia describes the force absorbed by a single hoof in every stride of a horse’s gallop—“a thousand pounds of pressure held up by that one thin leg”—she could also be describing Scanlan’s syntax: compact phrases holding so much pressure. The work is structured by recurring themes: the violence and pleasures of intimacy, the balm and exhaustion of hard work, our bonds with animals and with our own animal natures—those surges of desire and aggression that unseat and rearrange us.

Kathryn Scanlan makes the mundane details of everyday life hum with electricity.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about the track, by living it, by writing it, until I read Kathryn Scanlan’s dazzling novel, Kick the Latch—which is another thing altogether and an extraordinarily accurate picture of a life based on the love of racehorses.

The paragraphs of Kathryn Scanlan recall flat plains: they are without ornament, and their candidness may stun you. In Kick the Latch, the geography of Scanlan’s prose echoes the frankness of her narrator.

What’s mesmerizing here is Sonia’s voice, her rhythm and gift for telling a story. You forget for most of the ride that it’s a ventriloquy act and the author—Kathryn Scanlan—wields a mean stiletto for a crop. Bringing together two seemingly antithetical impulses—the authenticity of Sonia’s words, the artifice of Scanlan’s whittled down collage of those words—the book is a nifty feat of equipoise achieved with the same ease that the trainer notes in an ideal jockey who is able to “balance an egg on their back” without losing it. The hybrid that results is a wonderfully empathic window opened onto a fascinating life lived on the margins.

Kick the Latch, a short, absorbing novel about a racetrack horse trainer…is informed by a series of conversations with the real Sonia, who Scanlan met through her mother, and it has a blunt, vivid idiom that renders gore and beauty with similar clarity. That idiom is informed by Sonia’s own voice: “I wanted to preserve — amplify, exaggerate — Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech,” Scanlan says. The book feels like an interview, and it’s impressive what Scanlan does within that frame, especially with animals that serve as proxies for humans in their embodiment of power, independence, and humiliation.

Kathryn Scanlan’s words will mark you. Her work is sharp, deliberate, and poised—rife with subtly peculiar language.

Scanlan’s inventive novel documents a woman’s hardscrabble yet jubilant life and her dedication to working with racehorses. Shaped from interview transcripts with a real-life trainer named Sonia (no last name given), Scanlan’s vignettes carry readers across the arc of Sonia’s life…but the most beautiful moments are quiet ones, in which Sonia processes the choices she and others have made, and of the consequences she faces in a field dominated by men. With this sharp and lovely tribute to a singular woman, Scanlan continues to impress.

Kathryn Scanlan has performed a magical act of empathic ventriloquy in Kick the Latch. This immediate, engrossing immersion in another life and world, so personally and passionately told, is compulsively readable.

I have been following Kathryn Scanlan’s original voice for years. In her new venture—an unusually intimate, clear-eyed portrait of a tough and engaging woman conveyed in revelatory vignettes—every word is essential.