PositiveThe AtlanticCoyote may seem childlike at times, but Hanawalt never lets readers forget that this is, in the end, the story of a horse-obsessed cowgirl being chased by a vengeful posse of men who want to kill her ... Though inspired by Western stories, Coyote Doggirl carves out its own space, aesthetically and tonally. It doesn’t read like a straightforward subversion of the genre, even though it features many a recognizable building block ... Hanawalt’s book sheds the self-seriousness of the genre, but it also retains another sort of poignancy—one anchored by the heroine’s free spirit and stubborn sense of wonder in spite of the constant dangers she has to navigate. Coyote Doggirl is about a woman on the run, but it takes time to explore the tension between her extreme independence and her desire to connect with others, however imperfectly ... It’s a tale about surviving—a process that, for the most part, is deeply mundane until it’s not. But for Hanawalt, even the mundane vibrates with a sort of absurd humor and manic energy. A lot of her work focuses on how the repulsive, the frightening, and the bizarre animate everyday life, existing at its heart rather than at its margins; this book is no different.
