Oct 9

Oct 9 Kept Animals

Author: Kate Milliken
Publisher: Scribner
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A bold, riveting debut novel of desire, betrayal, and loss, centering on three teenage girls, a horse ranch, and the tragic accident that changes everything.

Rory Ramos is a dutiful teenager with a love of photography who works as a ranch hand at the stable her stepfather manages in Topanga Canyon, California, a dry, dusty place reliant on horses and hierarchies. There she rides for the rich clientele, including twins June and Wade Fisk. June begins to take an interest in Rory — but she is more drawn to Vivian Price, the beautiful teenager with the movie-star father, who lives down the hill, and Rory can’t help noticing, swims in her pool nearly every night. Rory’s ambiguous roots and blue-collar upbringing keep her largely separate from the likes of the Prices and the Fisks — until her stepfather is involved in a tragic car accident. From that moment on, the lives of these teenagers become inextricably linked — are they friends or foes, lovers or rivals? — sparking a series of events that come to a head the night a wildfire tears through Topanga Canyon, and Rory’s life is changed forever.

Kept Animals is narrated by Rory’s daughter, Charlie, twenty years after that fateful 1993 fire. Rory is away on assignment as a war photographer, and Charlie knows the key to her own existence lies in the story of what happened during that unseasonably warm fall. And without her mother to tell her the truth, she must unravel it by herself.

Taut, propulsive, and gorgeously written, Kate Milliken’s debut is a searing exploration of girlhood, class, and fate.

TL;DR Review

Kept Animals is an incredibly paced, scraping novel about growing up, fitting in, navigating class, and the reverberations of choices and trauma.

For you if: You love a heart-wrenching, character-driven novel.

Full Review

“I made choices in the weeks, the days, even the hours before that fire began that were the equivalent of lighting a match in the underbrush — selfish and risky — and I didn’t stop there.”

Kept Animals is the kind of novel that never stops moving forward, squeezing your heart and scraping out your insides along the way. My copy was gifted to me by the author, and I’m very grateful; I loved it.

The story takes place in two timelines — the main one in California in the 1993, and the other in Wyoming in 2015. In 2015, we have one narrator: Rory’s daughter. In 1993, we have several: Rory herself, who is the novel’s main character and a teenager finding herself through horses, and photography, and a burgeoning queer identity; Gus, her stepdad, who works at the barn; Vivian, the daughter of a movie star, desperately lonely in her family’s giant house; and occasionally Sarah, Vivian’s mother, feeling terribly trapped.

An unconscionable tragedy at the novel’s start kicks off a race to the tragedy that we know (thanks to Rory’s daughter in 2015) is coming at the end. We spend the book falling in love with all of these big, round characters — these characters who hurt and ache and want so desperately just to be loved — and wondering, wondering, wondering how this foretold ending is going to come about. And then…it does. And everything hurts.

I was so impressed by this novel’s shape and pacing. I just kept thinking, this is the essence of what novels are. The writing is so, so good, it will leave you feeling hollowed out in the best kind of way, a shell of a human. I definitely recommend.