Honestly, don't know if it's timing, or the profound connection to the West and its particular culture that I've been cultivating through my change in and commitment to my new home in Santa Fe and my new job at an all-girls middle school, but I couldn't put it down! Kyle's writing is smoothly eloquent and perfectly precise, capturing her young protagonist effortlessly and painting her world through her own honest eyes and heart. Twelve-year-old Alice is struggling with so much, and so much of this in complete silent loneliness...achingly adolescent, amplified....Yet, I came away from this read empathizing with almost all of the characters, from Alice's father and mother, to her older sister Nona and her sister's husband Jerry, to the Catfish-- specifically Patty Jo, Alice's grandparents, Sheila and her mother (maybe he father is the only character for whom I don't really feel any shred of compassion...), Alice's English teacher Mr. Delmar, each and every one of the horses...And this effect is no small feat, considering the fierce love Kyle creates in her reader for the heroine, who life it seems is as dismal and hard and painful as it is because of the wounds inflicted by these self-same characters...This is perhaps what's most striking about the novel...The humanity of it...It may call upon the GOD of animals in its title, but this novel is searching for the definition of something that umbrellas humans AS animals as well, to assuage her fears of loneliness and isolation...About half way through the story, in one of her secret closet conversations with Mr. Delmar, Alice speaks this truth:

" 'There ought to be more,' I told him.
'More than what?' he asked.
'Caring,' I said. 'Grace. There ought to be so much more than that.'
......If grace is the only thing out there to hope for, if no one's even paying attention, then what's the point?...Why does anyone bother with anything.'
'If you figure out the answer to that,' he told me, 'I want to be the first person you tell.'
'You'll be the only person.'" -p.179

In her interview at the end of my edition of the book (Scribner, paperback), Kyle talks about spirituality, and about her protagonist in this way, characterizing her understanding of, and reconciliation with, this emptiness, this dimension of human existence in this way...

"I'm by no means an expert on spirituality...But as a person who has spent a great deal of time looking for answers, I think that paying attention to nature is a pretty good place to start: there is no good, no bad, no right, wrong, FAIR. The lines between beauty and brutality can at times be hard to locate. Alice wants to believe that there's something out there in the universe that CARES. But in the end, she cares. And I think that, maybe, that's enough."

I will leave you with this, and say that this novel provides no simple comfort here, only a messy and counterintuitive one...but I THINK that it helps to make us feel less alone, less guilty, and ultimately, full of a kind of possibility for peace, both with ourselves and those who make up the constellation of our lives...