When I was a kid I read a lot of horse books, as one does, so when I heard about this book -- a fantasy novel kind of built around the structure of one of the classic varieties of horse books -- I was THERE. (I was also there for The Scorpio Races, back when that came out, which is the same kind of idea!)

The creatures being raced in this book, kehoks, are dangerous monsters whom the rider must control through sheer power of will over that of the kehok. Raia is a young woman who's run away from her abusive parents and needs resources to get them off her back; Tamra is a retired rider who now trains riders, and needs money to be able to keep her daughter with her. Together, they need to work to catapult Raia to winning kehok races, despite the enormous danger of the savage kehok Raia must ride!

This is all very classic horse book and I love it. However, it's not the only thing this book is doing. There's a second plot intertwined with this one, about the politics behind the recently dead emperor and what needs to be done to get the emperor-to-be on the throne, and the long and the short of it is that Raia racing with her kehok is in fact vital to the survival of the very empire. And like, okay, fair, those kinds of high stakes are classic for fantasy novels. But I think I just wanted this book to be horse-girl-book-but-fantasy, rather than horse-girl-book-subsumed-into-fantasy-tropes. I was there FOR the horse girl tropes, you know?

At any rate, I did appreciate that one of the main characters in this book is a middle-aged single mother, not a character type that often gets to be heroic in fantasy. And I loved Lady Evera, which is not something I would have thought from the beginning of the book, but she develops depths! And Raia did a great job in her role as ingenue, and I did find the whole plot to do with augurs mildly interesting. So overall a very good book, it's just too bad that it's not QUITE the kind of book I was most wanting it to be.