Carol Emshwiller’s stories reveal themselves in their own time. This one opens with the death of the protagonist’s mother and ends with …. well, you need to read that part yourself. Roberta, Bobby actually, is the perfect age – ten. She loves horses and lives with her mother and older sister, who earn money selling their knitting, in a rundown house some distance from the nearest town. Bobby dreams that maybe she flew when she was younger, but she’s not sure. She has an elbow that doesn’t quite work right and terrible scars on her back, but neither bother her much.
Her story starts when she finds a naked man near a tree that she waters each day. Lean, whiskery and odd, he has injured feet and responds to the name Mister Boots. It is clear to Bobby that Boots is a horse who has taken human form. As people who have attained the perfect age are wont to do, she chooses to keep his existence secret and help him. Her story starts again when her mother dies following a long illness. Suddenly matters of money and dealing with the world beyond their home become important – this is pre-Depression America and the real world is about to become very real indeed – as do Bobby’s long-absent father and the slightly odd Mister Boots. Before the story is over there will be magic, recession, gypsies, and violence.
Mister Boots is the kind of fantasy that doesn’t seem overmuch concerned with ‘fantasy’, and the kind of ‘young adult’ novel that understands that there’s a lot more ‘adult’ in young adults than we suspect. Written beautifully, economically, it addresses love, family, the abuse of power in relationships, personal freedom and other such weighty matters, yet is never weighty, never didactic.
If it is not already clear, I liked Mister Boots and liked it very much. I may read another novel I like as much this year, but I doubt I’ll read a better one. You can pre-order it here.