Book Review - The Secrets of Emberwild by Stephenia H. McGee

The Secrets of Emberwild by Stephenia H. McGee is about a woman, Nora Fenton, who is left to pick up the pieces after her father dies. Nora is a gifted horse trainer and loves to race and raise horses. She even prefers being in the company of them instead of men.  She finds that she can understand horses better, they are more reliable, and they don’t try to control her or tell her what to do. When her father passes away, Nora feels that she must save their struggling horse farm.

She decides that she will enter her prize colt in the harness race at the Mississippi Fair. If she wins, she feels that she might get a chance at independence and save her family’s farm. But in 1905, women were not allowed to race, and Nora was determined to race regardless of what was expected of her.

As if Nora doesn’t have enough on her plate, a stranger arrives at the farm in the guise of looking for work and starts to ask a lot of unsettling questions about the farm and their prized seed horse. She feels that he is asking these questions because he has a darker motive than just wanting the horse training job. However, she can’t help but feel that the stranger is connected to her father. Nora was there when her father took his last breath and had made a deathbed confession. Nora couldn’t completely piece together the remnants of the story her father tried telling her while gasping for breath. He had hinted at a dark secret about the farm and that everything he had built was based on lies.

Silas Cavallero feels that his father’s death wasn’t an accident no matter what everyone says. He knows his father was a gifted horse trainer and wouldn’t have died in a horse racing accident like everyone claims. He is willing to do whatever it takes to solve the mystery, so he travels to Emberwild to take a job and ask around if anyone knows his father. As Silas probes further into the mystery of his father’s death, someone is desperate to protect their secret that they won’t stop until Silas either gets the message and leaves or dies. Silas must decide if knowing the truth is worth risking his life for.

I thought the book was an okay read. I felt like the book was a bit long-winded at times. I didn’t connect with most of the characters, and I was disappointed that Nora’s mother was so detestable. I felt that as her mother, she could have done more to protect Nora and be more honest and upfront with her daughter. It seems that they both wanted the same things but Nora’s mother insists on being “cloak and dagger” about certain things, which didn't make the situation any better.  I didn’t connect with any of the characters and found most of the twists of the books to be predictable. I would be open to reading more books by the author, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to read more of their books.