Rough Magic : : Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race

Locations
Call Number: 921 Prior-Palmer, Lara
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Prior-Palmer, Lara	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to "the world's longest, toughest horse race"--an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that re-creates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan, and many fail to finish. Prior-Palmer had no formal training. She was driven by her own restlessness, stubbornness, and a lifelong love of horses. She raced for ten days through extreme heat and terrifying storms, catching a few hours of sleep where she could at the homes of nomadic families. Battling bouts of illness and dehydration, exhaustion and bruising falls, she decided she had nothing to lose. Each dawn she rode out again on a fresh horse, scrambling up mountains, swimming through rivers, crossing woodlands and wetlands, arid dunes and open steppe, as American television crews chased her in their jeeps. Told with terrific suspense and style, in a voice full of poetry and soul, Rough Magic captures the extraordinary story of one young woman who forged ahead, against all odds, to become the first female winner of this breathtaking race."--Dust jacket flap.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

"Wild" this is NOT submitted by mowjac on August 4, 2019, 10:46am Endurance and wilderness travel place one face to face with who one is and the best narratives offer insight into self, culture and place. Rough magic offers little insight, is very scanty on the details of the experience but does offer a young woman coming face to face with herself and her mixed feelings about that experience. Written 6 years and a cancer treatment after the event, descriptions of the land, the horses, her fellow riders and the externals are missing. There is no map and no photographs. What you get instead is a internal experience, stuffed with oddities of Mongolian culture and history she admits came from reading afterward (and one presumes, an editor had her include--page 67 is a good example of this) and some nice language. It doesn't live up to the hype but was compelling enough to finish.

One of my favorite books of 2019 submitted by dntanzer on August 28, 2019, 11:42pm I actually really loved this. The story is interesting and the narrator is such a real person. By that I mean she's young and imperfect and owns up to her mistakes. Between the actual story and the narrators willingness to discuss every aspect of the journey, including things that are generally considered uncomfortable, I was completely engrossed in this book!