* The book is delightful to read. I loved the language, which is beautiful and spoken in that part of the world. Sprinkling of Spanish in short dialogues is icing on the cake. (I had to keep google translate handy). The book increased my vocabulary. I learned quite a few things about the horses and life on the ranch. The author's description of the landscape is vivid and mesmerizing. The pace of the story is somewhat slow, but that's a small thing. There are many wonderful passages in the book, but my favorite is....
"He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits."
* Highly recommended.
