In the winter of 1917, with many of his regular hands off fighting in World War I, George Bliss hires young Martha Lessen, a female horse whisperer, to help gentle wild horses, and as she demonstrates her unique talent for dealing with damaged horses, gentles a horse for a dying man's son, and clashes with an abusive hired hand, she finds a sense of family and belonging. Molly Gloss’s affecting fourth novel turns the Western genre on its head with a woman as the mysterious stranger appearing on horseback, but Gloss is known for her independent, self-sufficient heroines. The Hearts of Horses is perhaps the most sentimental of all her works. Though the plot is more a collection of linked stories than a single, continuous narrative—a stylistic technique that most reviewers commented on but did not criticize—Gloss’s simple, unadorned prose and stark portrayal of the West during the first two decades of the 20th century create a moving, wistful memorial to a lost way of life. Shy, self-effacing Martha captivates her fellow humans in much the same way she charms wayward horses. Only USA Today suggested that the story lacks a certain warmth. However, Martha will no doubt beguile most readers. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. A female broncobuster? It seems doubtful, but with most of the able-bodied men off fighting in World War I, Oregon rancher George Bliss decides to take a chance on Martha Lessen. Barely 19 years old, Martha has three times the natural horse sense as more seasoned wranglers. With a talent for breaking horses to saddle in a uniquely gentle way, she soon proves herself in a man's world, becoming an indispensable part of the fabric of the community in the meantime. Martha's tail end of the frontier adventures is chronicled in a delightfully down-home, matter-of-fact voice by the author of The Jump-Off Creek (1989). Flanagan, Margaret MOLLY GLOSS is the author of Wild Life, winner of the James Tiptree Award, The Jump-Off Creek, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Dazzle of Day, a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Reviewed by Ron Charles Books about horses join a stable of well-loved titles foaled by Black Beauty in 1877. Over the years, Anna Sewell's only novel, which she called "the autobiography of a horse," has sold more than 50 million copies, and more recent titles, such as Nicholas Evans's The Horse Whisperer, Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit and Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven, have kept readers stampeding to the bookstore. I don't know if Molly Gloss's lovely new novel will spur such intense interest, but I hope so. The Hearts of Horses is set in northeastern Oregon in 1917, the twilight of the Old West when that way of life was already legendary. The story begins, as such legends must, with a mysterious figure riding into view on a badly scarred mare. But Gloss immediately begins to transform these worn conventions. This stranger is 19-year-old Martha Lessen, the first girl anyone in these parts "had seen advertising herself as a broncobuster." Since most of the young men who worked these farms have headed off to the war in Europe, Martha is "looking for horses that needed breaking out." She sets aside her natural bashfulness long enough to tell a skeptical rancher, "I can gentle most anything that has four feet and a tail." That's a fair description of this author's ability, too. Although a strong feminist impulse runs through the story, it's been expertly "gentled." Martha has no sense that she's part of any movement toward gender equality, but she looks like Calamity Jane, and Gloss notes that "in her childhood daydreams she was always a boy." Even now, she "liked it better when the men seemed to forget she was a girl." And so she has left her abusive father "to live a footloose cowboy life and see the places she'd read about in Western romances." She asks only for space in a barn, sleeping on a bed she sewed from a wool blanket and an old fur rug. With a candle to read a few pages of Black Beauty before falling off to sleep, she's got all she needs. Gloss helps us understand just how radical this young woman's method is at a time when animals were beaten and tortured -- sometimes to death -- in the name of taming them. "Plenty of men thought nothing of being rough with horses," she writes. "A horse had to have his spirit entirely broken was what a lot of men thought, had to be beaten into abject submission." By that violent standard, what Martha does with a bucking chestnut seems like doing nothing at all: singing almost inaudibly for hours, brushing the horse with her hands, walking slowly around a field. But the proof is in her remarkable results, derived from a deep sensitivity to these giant animals. Before long, she's signed on with seven clients in a 15-mile circuit, riding and training horses from one farm to the next each day. That work plan also provides the novel's structure, which allows Gloss to move through these intercon