The God of Animals
by Aryn Kyle
From the back cover:
When her older sister runs away to marry a rodeo cowboy, twelve-year-old Alice Winston is left to bear the brunt of her family's troubles--a depressed, bedridden mother; a reticent, overworked father; and a run-down horse ranch in Desert Valley, Colorado. To make ends meet, the Winstons board the horses of rich neighbors, and as their lives become intertwined with the lives of their clients, Alice is drawn into an adult world of secrets and hard truths. She soon discovers that people--including herself--can be cruel, can lie and cheat, and every once in a while, can do something heartbreaking and selfless.
First paragraph:
Six months before Polly Cain drowned in the canal, my sister, Nona, ran off an married a cowboy. My father said there was a time when he would have been able to stop her, and I wasn't sure if he meant a time in our lives when she would have listened to him, or a time in history when the Desert Valley Sheriff's Posse would have been allowed to chase after her with torches and drag her back out to our house by her yellow hair. My father had been a member of the sheriff's posse since before I was born, and he said that the group was pretty much the same as the Masons, except without the virgin sacrifices. They paid dues, rode their horses in parades, and directed traffic at the rodeo where my sister met her cowboy. Only once in a great while were they called upon for a task of real importance, like clearing a fallen tree from a hunting trail, or pulling a dead girl out of the canal.
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