Reviews - Dark Horses: A Novel

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327 reviews for:

Dark Horses: A Novel

Susan Mihalic

3.93 AVERAGE

cecil_reads's review against another edition

3.0

dark emotional sad medium-paced

mellular's review against another edition

3.0

It pains me to write a middling review for Dark Horses. It’s hard to boil down a book like this into a star review, so bear with me, this is going to be long.

What started out as a deeply compelling story of a teenage girl ensnared by her abusive, larger than life father, fell apart in spectacular revenge fantasy fashion in the final chapters.

Off the bat, I should premise my comments by saying that I work with people who have survived circumstances like Roan’s on a regular basis. As a prosecutor who deals primarily with sexual offence work, I have seen resiliency, and the impacts of trauma in many different forms. Every survivor of sexual abuse is different- there is no one way for someone who has lived through this type of abuse to respond or react.

I noticed in scrolling through negative reviews, that some readers framed this book as “trauma porn” or “painting an inaccurate picture of a sexual abuse survivor”. I saw critiques about the protagonist, Roan Montgomery’s rejection of “victim hood”, and criticism about the way she empathized with her abuser, engaged in sex with her boyfriend Will, and strove to compartmentalize her abuse as part of her daily life. For whatever it’s worth, I could not disagree more vehemently with these critiques, which seem to treat sexual abuse survivors as a singular entity that respond to trauma in a universally recognized manner. In case I didn’t emphasize this enough the first time- there is no right or wrong way for a victim to act! I have seen survivors reject the term victim (or refuse to be defined by it), I have seen survivors develop empathy or love for the abuser or respond physically to the sexual acts they are forced to engage in, I have seen survivors who felt they were complicit or partially to blame, and compartmentalization is not an uncommon coping mechanism. All this to say, I found the depiction of Roan, her complexities and varied responses to her father’s abuse to be well-written, true to life, and trauma-informed. The story had clearly been well-researched, and in my mind, the struggle to find one’s agency and break free from abuse was poignant and believable.

So why the 3-star review? Well, without revealing any specific plot details, the ending took the easy way out. The story shifted from being grounded in reality, to full-blown melodramatic revenge thriller. Then, to top it all off, there was a brief Lifetime TV movie-esque epilogue that doubled down on the dramatic tonal shift. By engaging in a revenge fantasy parallel universe, Dark Horses prioritized surface-level catharsis over realistic story beats. I read an NPR interview with the author Susan Mihalic where she described making the active choice not to “fade to black” during scenes depicting abuse, as to do so is a form of censoring the voices of survivors. I admired this conscious, gutsy decision. While these scenes are harrowing and hard to get through, they are also, in my view, key to telling an authentic story. Yes sometimes a body DOES physically respond in a positive way to the sexual abuse, sometimes survivors question whether they need/like/deserve the abuse. HOWEVER, Mihalic effectively ripped the rug out from under all the work she had done to tell a truthful empowering narrative when she wrote that ending. Rather than engage in the messy work of depicting healing, forgiveness and moving on- she prioritized shock and awe, and fast-tracked Roan’s escape from the cycle of abuse through the use of dramatic external circumstances. It ultimately cheapened the story and felt out of step with everything that had come before.

All told, despite the immensely problematic ending, the majority of Dark Horses is a nuanced depiction of childhood trauma and abuse, and the complexities of trying to break free from an abuser’s stranglehold. This is a bold first novel for Susan Mihalic to have written, and one that I won’t soon forget.

TW: sexual abuse, addiction, animal abuse