Author of the internationally bestselling Gossip Girl series, Cecily von Ziegesar moves onto new turf in Dark Horses. Due out this month from Soho Teen with a 50,000-copy first printing, the novel centers on Merritt, a troubled teen who is shipped off to a residential equine therapy program, where she is paired with – and immediately bonds with – Red, an equally damaged and equally rebellious former race horse. When the two are swept into the competitive equestrian circuit, their story evolves into one of jealousy, romance, mystery, and redemption.
With Dark Horses, von Ziegesar followed a familiar literary maxim: “Write what you know.” She grew up around horses, and remembers at a very young age riding in a saddle in front of her mother or father on the farm where the family summered. The author began competing in horse shows at 16. Though she hadn’t ridden since her college days, she got back on a horse about six years ago, after her daughter (now 14), spurred on by a photograph of her mother riding as a girl, asked if she could take riding lessons. “When she began riding, I decided to get back into it, too,” said von Ziegesar.
An avid reader of horse stories in her childhood (“I read and reread every single one I could get my hands on”), von Ziegesar was especially drawn to Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series and My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, as well as Jill Krementz’s photo-essay, A Very Young Rider, which profiles a girl and her pony. Though she noted that she had always wanted to write a novel about a horse, the author said she had deliberated about what that book should be. “I knew I wanted to write a book that no one had ever read before – and one I’d want to read,” she recalled. “I didn’t want my novel to be a traditional, sappy story about a girl and a horse who fall in love, with a predictable, happy ending.”
A Matter of Perspective
As a writer, von Ziegesar said she is intrigued by another horse-themed classic, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, because it’s written from the horse’s point of view. “I became determined to try that too,” she said. “But knowing myself as a writer, I knew my horse wouldn’t be as earnest and gentle as Black Beauty. So the idea of writing a classic bad-boy story came to me – but in this case that bad boy just happens to be a horse. Like us, animals have their own foibles and personality issues, and bad things happen to them that they might never get over. So the idea began percolating about a troubled girl who falls in love with a troubled horse, and the two try to fix each other. And I soon realized that it wasn’t enough to write the story from just Red’s point of view, so I decided to alternate the perspectives of Merritt and Red.”
The notion of having her characters strive to save each other was also rooted in real life. “After my daughter began riding, she spent a week at Pony Farm Summer Camp in Temple, N.H.,” said von Ziegesar. The camp is located at Touchstone Farm, which also offers equine therapy programs. “I learned a bit about their programs from the camp owner,” the author added. “One day shortly after that, while walking my dog, I happened to meet someone whose child had attended a life-saving equine therapy program in Tennessee. And I decided I wanted my horse novel to have that element in it.”
Von Ziegesar was given creative carte blanche by Daniel Ehrenhaft, editorial director of Soho Teen, who, said the author, “pursued me for quite a while to publish a book with him.” The two have remained in touch since they were editors at Alloy Entertainment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Ehrenhaft worked on the first of her Gossip Girl novels. “Dan told me, ‘Write whatever you like – just make sure there’s a mystery in it,’ ” said von Ziegesar.
“As an author, I’ve always gravitated toward mysteries, and Soho Press was for a long time known largely for its Soho Crime list,” Ehrenhaft explained. “At Soho Teen, we’re evolving in terms of our definition of mystery – it’s now more broad and loose. Our list features books that are about self-discovery or high stakes, and are character-driven – and Dark Horses is certainly all that. And the story is set up as a mystery, since we know early on that Red’s life is at stake – so the stakes are very high from the beginning.”
Ehrenhaft had faith in von Ziegesar’s vision for Dark Horses' premise and narrative voice. “I knew how much time Cecily has spent with horses, and knew she’d been a competitive equestrian,” he said. “So when she shared her idea of writing the story partially from the horse’s point of view, I knew she could pull it off better than anyone. I’ve always loved her writing – which has so much humor and quirkiness. I wanted to be surprised by Dark Horses, and I was. I was expected something amazing, and that’s what she delivered.”
Dark Horses by Cecily von Ziegesar. Soho Teen, $18.99 Sept. ISBN 978-1-61695-517-5
