Blog Tour + Giveaway: Wild Horse by Kyle Richardson

Thank you to Meerkat Press for sending us a finished copy of Wild Horse in exchange for an honest review!

Wild Horse is a YA dystopian/superhero novelette by Kyle Richardson. Clocking in at right around 10k words, it’s a very quick read.

Synopsis

Grady has found a crack in the wall—a crack to the outside world. But all he
knows about life outside the compound comes from books, magazines, and a photograph of a
creature that no longer exists. Things change when he meets a girl with raspberry-yellow hair,
and a secret that could lead them to a world beyond the walls. A world where their abilities could
change everything … or lead them both to ruin.

Likes

• You can tell when a writer loves language, and words, and the art of crafting intentional yet musical sentences that practically dance off the page. Kyle Richardson is one of those writers.

• The premise (people in hazmat suits experimenting on children with special powers) is dark and I love that, especially in a story set in a dystopian world.

• There is a bit of a twist near the end that I would typically see coming. I am VERY hard to surprise. I don’t know if I was just tired as I read this, or genuinely surprised, but I didn’t see the twist coming until I was right on top of it, which is a delightful rarity.

Dislikes

• Because Richardson’s writing is dense, and often reads like poetry, I can see why this book is a novelette as opposed to a full novel. Expanding this story and world with the author’s current tendency to bask in the glow of the written word simply wouldn’t work. The narrative arc would become too bogged down, and the story wouldn’t flow as well as it currently does. However, I feel like this story would benefit greatly from being fleshed out. I don’t necessarily need to know anything more about the scary hazmat suit people, or even how this world got to a place where they’re experimenting on children they keep locked up in jail, but I do want to know back stories about the main characters. We get little glimpses, like a magazine page with the picture of a horse on it that Grady keeps above his bed, but I’d like more. I want to know more about where Cassie, the raspberry-yellow haired girl, came from. I want to see more of the landscape and cities and wild expanses in between cities than just a pretty line about seasons changing or a bruised sky

• Also, as much as I connected to the characters, I also feel distant from the brutality of this world (and it is brutal) because it’s in third person. This might be an intentional choice to belie tone, or illustrate how used to brutality Grady has become in this post-horse, post-book, post-magazine world, but a first person POV might help strengthen the emotional connection the reader is meant to have with both Grady and Cassie.

Overall Rating

3/5

Check out Wild Horse for yourself, and let us know what you think in the comment section below!

Where to Buy

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Goodreads

Giveaway

Click here and enter to win a $20 Amazon gift card!