House Rules

House Rules

In an odyssey through a world of drugs and sexual violence, Lee joins the horse-show circuit, has a lesbian affair with a fellow rider, hooks up with a disreputable team of trainers, and confronts the disturbing realities of her world. A first novel. This novel offers a stark, shocking view of a world of sex, drugs, and violence as seen through the eyes of an insecure but streetwise 15-year-old. Lee is kicked out of boarding school for doing drugs. She's unable to go home because of her father's increasingly jealous and violent sexual abuse. So she heads for the horse show circuit and the trainer who sheltered her during her years of riding. Soon, a crush on top rider Tory Markham lures Lee into joining "The Ruskers," who succeed in part through Linda Rusker's adroit drug management of both horses and riders. Tory and Lee are soon addicted to heroin. Only jumping her horses gives Lee a greater rush than drugs or sadistic sex, until an accident interrupts the cycle. This is a strong and graphic first novel, skillfully constructed and relentless in exposing Lee's pain and her world. For popular fiction collections. - Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L. , Va. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. A young woman gets lost on the dark side of the horse-show circuit, where drug addiction and sexual abuse mingle almost indistinguishably with pleasure and true love. Fifteen-year-old Lee gets kicked out of boarding school for having a party with boys and pot, even though she doesn't like either of them. She can't go home because her mother doesn't want her and her father wants her too much. So, after collecting on some drug debts and selling all she owns, she heads to Florida to meet up with the horse show, hoping for refuge with a trainer named Silas who, since she was eight, has taken her in whenever she has had to get away from her family. But Lee finds a different sort of refuge with Tory, a woman rider with a much alluded-to but vague reputation for drugs and trouble. Their affair quickly escalates from seemingly innocent groping in the horse tents to rough and painful sex that, though sadly similar to life at her parents' house, is much less frightening to Lee than real tenderness. Tory leads Lee to her trainers, Linda and Carl, notorious for their fierce and effective horse-training techniques. Lee soon learns that these methods extend to the riders as well: Linda begins pumping her with synthetic heroin and touching her until she's ``split up inside.'' But even the unflinching descriptive detail is dwarfed by Lee's terrifying laissez-faire attitude: ``I'm not reckless by nature. It's more I get a certain way in and then can't turn back.'' Not until after Tory falls does Lee gather the courage to act. Brutal, sensual, honest, and seductive. A powerful debut. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. A harrowing, shockingly authentic, savagely funny novel of a teenage girl's odyssey through sexual violence and drugs--the most electrifying fictional debut since Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero .