Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

A lot of my friends have gotten killed. A lot of them have steel rods down their spines. One guy lot his leg. He was a jockey who lost his leg, but he'd still gallop horses and pony them to the gate. Sometimes his fake leg would fall off when he was riding and someone had to run out and pick it up for him.

There's a lot of pain and pill abuse. You learn some of them are drunks. They show up to hot walk and they're drunk. When they say they're hungry, you don't give them money. You take them to get a bite instead.

Kathryn Scanlan's Kick the Latch is the story of a horse trainer named Sonia. Sonia grows up with a love for horses and wants to be a jockey, but she's too tall; as a child, she stacks books on her head to keep her from growing. She becomes a successful trainer, working mostly at low-rent tracks, which are worlds away from the mint juleps and fancy hats of the Kentucky Derby. It's a hard life: back-breaking and highly physical. The "backside" of the tracks are little universes of their own, places where people spend all their time because of the grueling nature of the job, and they have their own small and large human dramas. It's a tough place for women, and Sonia is belittled and doubted, and once, raped. But she's good at what she does.

Kick the Latch is based, the afterword notes, on a series of interviews with the real "Sonia," but the result is a fictional version of the real person's life. If there are seams between reality and fiction, they don't show: Scanlan captures the earthy and reflective voice of Sonia; each vignette sounds like what it is, a story told over the phone. As a result, Kick the Latch has a powerful verisimilitude. You're convinced by the specificity of the detail, the truth of the language: the Bowie Clay and leg paint, the doping, the untrustworthy jockeys who shock their horses with electrical devices to give them an edge, the horrible accidents that leave some jockeys and trainers wrecked or paralyzed. It's a convincing portrait of a person in an unglamorous profession; sometimes there's nothing more captivating than a portrait of a person who is utterly devoted to some niche and invisible task.

Sonia's life is long and varied. Her successes are bringing horses that no one believed in into the winner's circles. The challenges are tough--the physical labor, the instability of track life--and she ends up getting seriously injured and going into a coma. When she emerges, she has to give up the life she's loved. For a while she takes a position as a groomer with more expensive, Derby-bound stables, but the rigidity and absurdity of the high-stakes world is distasteful. She leaves horses entirely and takes a job as a prison warden, which is, as you might expect, no easier for women. The parallels between the two jobs--the hard hours, the detailed care required toward captive creatures, the way those creatures are devalued and abused, the sexism--are there, but never overdone; Sonia's life never becomes a metaphor or an allegory. She is only what she is: dedicated, strong, even in a small way, heroic.