This is the interesting tale of one year in a 12 year old girl's life.
Etta begged for a horse and when she finally received one was filled with disappointment. Troy was at least 20 years old and not all that friendly. When he is hit by lightning, she has hopes he is dead and out of her hair.
But he manages to shake it off and come back. He can't hold his head up, he's scarred, can only see out of one eye and is probably deaf. Etta's neighbor is sure he has risen from the dead. Etta is sure he's got supernatural powers and is Evil.
Somewhere along the way, Etta has a change of heart and decides that she needs to show Troy that she's a worthy person and wants to make repairs for her bad thoughts regarding him, her brother and others surrounding them.
That's what this story is truly about - Etta, the 12 year old girl discovering herself and growing with her thoughts and emotions through this turbulent age. Not only her own age, but the time and place the world and her town is in then.
For good or bad, during this important year in her life, Troy never leaves Etta's side, whether she wants him there or not. Maybe he does have supernatural powers......
Mercer University Press
Summer, 2016
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Excerpt:
By
the sound of his hooves plodding towards me, I recognized the old
horse. He thumped closer and closer until finally—the odors of blackened
earth and tobacco and wet horse gathering into a swelling warmth—Troy
stood over me.
At
first I was frightened. In the rain and lightning, his scarred side
looked raw and somehow bloody. He stomped his front hooves. He could
easily kick me, as Cleo had feared he might. But he only shook his mane,
then lowered his head towards mine.
In
that other storm, lightning-struck he'd lain half-dead in Jesse's pen.
I'd gone to him. Now he had come to me. "Troy." My teeth were
chattering. "Good boy."
How
did he do it? Escape the pasture the way he did? He had powers, but
not from the Devil as Cleo thought. Like Pegasus, he had wings. And
he'd come, even in the storm, with his wings and his third eye, to help
me. To save me.
I began to feel forgiven. I pulled myself to my knees and reached up, feeling for Troy's mane. "Let me—just—hang on."
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In May of 1964, eleven-year-old Etta McDaniel's horse is struck by lightning—dead and gone, she hopes, out of her life "as though he'd never come in the first place, bringing with him one catastrophe after another." But Troy, gruesomely scarred, not only survives but seems to have gained supernatural powers, which Etta sets her mind on harnessing in her search for treasure. She is convinced that a find of the sort her hero Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at ancient Troy will set to rights everything suddenly gone wrong in her life: rivalry and betrayal at home and social unrest reaching even her family's farm. Troy has other plans.