RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe voice of a bright, stunted, 35-year-old orphan named Frankie pulls me smack into Jessie van Eerden’s Call It Horses and does not release me until well after the book’s last word. That voice sounds rasped, imperfect, and running the full register ... van Eerden brings her reader right inside her ordinary, yet remarkable, protagonist’s life and mind. The reader experiences the ride in sensuous detail, from a closer vantage point than many authors can achieve ... The scenes Frankie shares are rich and immediate, and the reader more lives Frankie’s rural West Virginia life than learns of it ... Van Eerden builds suspense using the interplay between the road trip and its backstory. She doles out a tantalizing tidbit, a curiosity, in one story, before revealing the answer, often in the other. The reader glimpses relationship dynamics that then emerge into clear sight and, finally, crescendo. Van Eerden has crafted characters so rich that the reader seems to be meeting real people in these pages ... Van Eerden writes so lyrically that Call It Horses often feels like poetry or music ... Symbols and metaphors pulse a profound, beautiful, almost archetypal energy throughout the book: beets, caves, birds, and, of course, horses.
