Thea Atwell, fifteen, precocious and handsome, has been sent away from her Florida home for committing a shameful sin that has destroyed her family. Her father, desperate to put some distance between Thea and her family in Florida, enrols her in the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, in the mountains of North Carolina, where Thea will meet the daughters of the wealthiest families in the South, who travel to Yonahlossee to become young ladies. Thea's time at Yonahlossee will change her forever...
At camp Thea meets Sissy, a charming girl with a wardrobe to die for who quickly becomes her best friend, Leona, the prodigiously talented rider whose aloofness hides the financial difficulties her family are in, and the intoxicating Mr Holmes, headteacher of Yonahlossee and father of three beautiful daughters. Thea quickly becomes entangled in the Holmes family's life, teaching the three girls to ride during an enforced break from her own riding training, and developing an all-consuming crush on their father.
This fabulous coming of age novel by Anton DiSclefani follows Thea's journey to adulthood high in the mountains of North Carolina. By the time Thea comes to leave the camp, she is an entirely different girl from the naive teenager who arrived at Yonahlossee. Fans of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep will eat this up - Thea has Lee Fiora's self-awareness, which makes her an excellent narrator.
This book has plenty more to enjoy. Yonahlossee itself is a seductive paradise, far from the concerns of depression-era America. The girls wear white uniforms and sleep in cabins between hazy days of formal education, baths outside, dances in the cabin and, of course, horse-riding lessons. The camp is set in beautiful mountains, perfect for night rides and days dreaming while staring out of the window. DiSclefani creates an enchanting bubble in the camp; it's so lovely you wonder how any of the girls can bear to leave it. Perhaps it's a symbol for the fleeting beauty of adolescence itself, an intoxicating time that once left can never be recaptured.
DiSclefani captures perfectly the relationship between teenage girls, a mixture of jealousy, closeness and distance which each girl must negotiate. Thea helps Sissy meet her boyfriend at night in the woods, breaking the camp's rules for her friend, but feels jealous as she does and seems to half wish that Sissy will be caught.
The boarding school novel is a classic for a reason: adolescence, a closed environment and a rigid sense of time passing all mean that these novels, from Mallory Towers to Harry Potter to Prep have an enduring appeal. Yonahlossee is a new addition to this canon and destined to become a classic of the genre.
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclefani will be published on 6 June by Tinder Press. I must thank Helena Towers at Tinder Press who provided me with a review copy of this novel.
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