Rough Magic by Lara Prior Palmer ***(of 4)

Lara Prior Palmer was not just the first woman to win the cross-Mongolia horse race, she was also the youngest, capturing first place at the age of 18. It seems anyone can enter, and on a whim, without training, but a general knowledge of horses, Prior Palmer entered the race as a better post-high school adventure than entering college. Racers traverse 1,000 km of Mongolian steppe by riding one semi-wild pony after another.

Chafing, blisters, sunburn, falls, diarrhea, drunk Mongolians, injuries, and exhaustion overtake more than half the competitors every year. And yet, as they say, she persisted, enduring all those calamities. 

What emerges in this memoir is a woman who can communicate with horses in ways I did not know were possible, probably a compensation for her relative inability to interact with people. Prior Palmer's internal dialogue appears on paper with the wisdom of a woman double her age and craft of a writer with four times her experience.

Her ability to see herself as a teenager with the eyes of an adult might be summarized by a question asked at the beginning. "Are we met with a sudden urge to avoid the direct path to middle age and subsequent visions of growing old in a lonely world of cats?" Will we, she asks, forego the opportunity, "to be wild and snort about like a horse?"