Home on the ranch; Aryn Kyle's stunning debut is a wry and moving look at a disappearing way of life.

Byline: Megan O'grady

No one understands better than Aryn Kyle the pitfalls of penning a book about a young girl coming of age on a horse farm in the West. "When I was looking for a title, my friends joked that I should call it Horses. The jacket copy would read, 'If you like horses, then you'll love Horses.'_"

Happily for the rest of us, plaintive whinnies and majestic steeds are nowhere to be found in the 29-year-old's astonishingly assured debut, more evocatively entitled The God of Animals (Scribner). Nothing is idealized about twelve-year-old Alice Winston's passage to adulthood in Desert Valley, Colorado: Her depressed mother keeps to her bed; her beautiful older sister has eloped with a rodeo cowboy; a classmate has mysteriously drowned in a canal. Her father struggles to keep the stable afloat by boarding the equine pets of wealthy, flirtatious women from the rapidly encroaching suburban sprawl. Then there's Alice's unorthodox relationship with her disaffected En_glish teacher.

This powerfully understated, ruefully funny novel grew out of a dazzling short story Kyle wrote while attending the University of Montana's creative-writing program and published, virtually unedited, in The Atlantic Monthly. But it wasn't till three years later, ...