Beautifully written novel about a 19 yr old man working on cowboy movies in the 1930s as a stunt rider. I love that Gloss always has unconventional characters that are fully developed in her novels. ( )

Loved it. My full review won't be online until the book is published in October, but I really loved this book. Go read it when it comes out. ( )

“Falling from Horses” is a stand-alone novel that takes up the story of Bud Frazer, the son of Martha Lessen, the heroine of “The Hearts of Horses”. Once again, Gloss uses the eastern Oregon ranch settings as background, alternating with memoir-like sections from Bud as he spends a year in California chasing his dream of becoming a stunt rider or actor working in the western movies so prevalent in the 1930s.
On the bus ride to Hollywood, Bud meets a young woman, Lily Shaw, who dreams of writing for the movies, and the two form a friendship that follows them and shapes the rest of their lives.

As always, Gloss uses a strong sense of place and depends on simple language to spell out difficult concepts – sometimes of the harsh life of hardscrabble ranch families in Oregon’s high desert country, sometimes the cruelties inherent in the treatment of animals in the film industry of the era. Never sentimental about her animal characters, Gloss nevertheless understands and communicates the ways in which living and working with animals shapes humans as well.

The memoir-like sections, told in Bud’s voice, read so much like nonfiction that the reader frequently must stop and remember that they, like the third-person narratives of Bud’s earlier life on a series of small ranches, are at heart fictional.

Towards the end of the book, Gloss uses Bud’s voice to get at the heart of the matter – “[T]he hard knot that is our myth of the cowboy West; the violence on the movie screen and behind it and the way the humanity has been hollowed out of our movie heroes and villains, the poverty, isolation, and precariousness of ranch work, the dignity and joy of it, and the necessary cruelty.”

While not the best of Gloss’s works, it’s still rewarding on a number of levels, and gives a strong voice to what is essentially Americana. ( )

Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss was an interesting read set in 1938 Hollywood as it deals with the hopes and dreams of two young people who soon learn that the movie business is anything but glamorous. Presented as the memoir of Bud Frazer, an aging artist, the book tells of his year in Hollywood as he first tried to break into the movies then spent time as a wrangler and stunt rider.

Bud is a young man who has been raised around horses all his life. He decides to go to Hollywood and become a cowboy star. Of course, once he gets there he finds there is no market for his acting skills but he does land a job wrangling horses on the movie sets and eventually becomes a stunt rider and extra. On the bus to Hollywood he meets and becomes good friends with Lilly Shaw, who is going to Hollywood to write movie scripts. They quickly discover that this business is very hard on both horses and women. The stunts were performed with trip wires and very little tricks were used. If a horse needed to go off a cliff, then off it went. Both the horses and the young men who rode them were disposable. As for women, well, they were treated as even more disposable than horses. Winding through the main story of these two characters trying to make it in a tough business were flashbacks to the disappearance and death of Bud’s sister.

The story, told in Bud’s straightforward style could be quite rambling and repetitive at times, due to Bud’s failing memory, but this quirk made the book seem all the more realistic. The authors sense of place and time felt very authentic and I liked the fact that Bud and Lilly only had a friendship, there was no romance. Although I found Falling From Horses was a little slow moving, the story was fascinating and kept my interest. ( )

This book is near-perfect. It is so very real in its characterization, and it has so much of importance to say about grief and pain and coping with the sorrows that life throws at you. Plus, it is beautifully written. I have read a couple of other books by Molly Gloss, and I enjoyed those as well, but this is a tremendous work of art. ( )