Guest Reviewer: Breaking Pattern, Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka

Editor's Note (Michael Sedano): Earlier in March, La Bloga-Tuesday when featured Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilara Guest Reviewing Xochitl-Julissa Bermejo's Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, we promised a review of the reviewer's own book. It's La Bloga-Tuesday's distinct pleasure welcoming Lisbeth Coiman's dicho review.

Breaking Pattern for YA Heroines

Guest Reviewer Lisbeth Coiman. 

Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera. Breaking Pattern. Riverside, CA: Inlandia Institute, December 2023 

In Ponca City, OK during rodeo season, I sat on the bleachers trying to understand whatever was happening in the arena, because the presenter’s Oklahoma droll didn’t help me. Then my neighbor and former Rodeo Queen bought a 40-acre piece of land because she loved horses so much. She needed the space. Soon she was boarding horses, and my son was one of her first students on the ranch. 

 

All those memories came back while reading Breaking Pattern by Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera (link). In Reichle-Aguilera’s debut novel, this Young Adult dramatic tale of junior rodeos happens at the intersection of horses, tender love, family dynamics, gender, class, and mental health. 

 

The main character, Adriana Elizabeth Herrera Bowen, is a 17 year-old girl who dreams of winning the All-around Rodeo competition. She is a junior in high school and enjoys the support of her father but has a conflicted relationship with her mother. 

The seemingly overprotective mother is opposed to Adriana competing in rodeo because of the inherent risk of injury. The reader later learns her parents have been holding a painful secret from her. The mother has been projecting trauma and long lasting grief on her daughter. Thus, Reichle-Aguilera explores mental health issues through the strained mother-daughter relationship.

“I pick up the picture. How did Joseph die?” 

     She takes a deep breath. “At the park. Some kids were spinning the merry-go-round too fast. He lost his grip, hit his head on the metal, and landed on the concrete.” 

     “Nothing your mother could have done.” She looks me in the eyes. “She’s carried that guilt all these years. That’s why she’s afraid of everything.” 

     “That’s why she hates me doing rodeo. She’s afraid I’ll fall off and die.” I slump into my seat and try to stop seeing that baby, my brother, and his fragile little head. “How old was he?”

     “Almost four.””

Besides her immediate family, Adriana enjoys a beautiful supportive network of loving people which includes tía, cousin, and friends. Like her, her friends compete in junior rodeos and help each other overcome obstacles in the competitions. 

 

Along with Adriana, most of these young cowboys and cowgirls come from working class families. Acutely aware of her family’s financial limitations, Adriana takes on extra work to help pay her entry fees. 

 

When presented with the opportunity to join one of the most coveted competitions, team roping, for which Adriana seems to have a natural talent, our young heroine stands for her principles and her friends, rejecting the financial benefit of pairing up with a wealthy, handsome, yet despicable male acquaintance. 

 

Breaking Pattern deserves a place alongside the best equestrian stories: Black Beauty, The Horse Whisperer, Seabiscuit,  My Friend Flicka

To solve their money issues, Adriana’s father takes a job that will move the family hours away to a different state. If Adriana moves with her parents, she won’t be able to compete in California. Devastated, Adriana doubles down her effort to win the junior rodeo competitions, even if it means to study to pass English and Math classes and take on extra work for a chance to become an independent young woman and not having to move with her folks across the river to Arizona.  

 

Thus, she juggles her academic responsibilities--albeit unwillingly--horse duties at a boarding ranch, rodeo practice, and quinceañera prep for her cousin’s birthday party. Adriana seems to cope with it all. What she lacks in financial resources, Adriana excels in life skills and emotional intelligence. She has a vision for her future, can drive and gets her driver’s license, and can take care of an injured horse as if she had received medical training. Adriana deals with poverty head on with impressive work ethic. She breaks the pattern of low expectations associated with poverty and aims for her most ambitious goals.

 

What’s most striking is Adriana’s fierce support for her friends, individually or on the common competitive arena, in junior rodeo. Without passing judgement first, unbeknownst to her parents, Adriana drives her friend to another city so that her friend can get a pregnancy test. Adriana supports women’s right about their bodies even when she doesn’t have the words to name her political decisions. Fortunately, the situation turns into a false alarm, but we know Adriana would have backed her friend no matter her choice, had the friend been pregnant.

 

“Our plan: I’ll drive to Pomona. We’ll be at the clinic an hour or so, get back to Runnel Valley to erase the school’s truancy messages before our moms are home.

   But the waiting room is packed when we arrive. It smells like piss and sickness and now I am gonna catch some fatal disease.

   Hayley isn’t pregnant. “But we have to go to a pharmacy. Nurse said there’s one up the street a ways.” She mumbles something about untreated STD.

   Maybe I don’t want to have sex. Ever.”

 

Similarly, Adriana accepts to be a pretend girlfriend when her best friend Eric needed a good cover for his sexual orientation to take his mother off his back to find a girlfriend. She keeps the secret so convincingly that the entire group of friends believe the young couple to be in-love. 

 

“’I don’t want a girlfriend, any girlfriend.’ … ‘But could you pretend to be my girlfriend so my mom will stop asking who I’m taking to the prom and talking me up to girls at church?’” 

. . .

“I stop him. Put both my hands on his shoulders and look right into his speckled green eyes. ‘Of course, I’ll be your girlfriend.’ I whisper, ‘For pretend.’ I lean my forehead into his. ‘Then everyone will stop asking me about us, and my mom will forget about Clay Campbell.’”

 

In that time period, Adriana would have been considered a tomboy. But the gender politics in this family seem to be more complex. Her mother doesn’t approve of her interest in horses because she wants her daughter to be more feminine. Her father doesn’t approve of her wearing a strapless dress because she might look like a prostitute. Adriana’s mother even calls her mentors, “marimachas,” the Spanish word for “dyke.” 

 

There is no doubt Adriana likes boys although she just does not fit a female stereotype. She has a crush on Eric, looks at his muscles, fantasizes being close to him even if she can’t walk on high heels. The idea of wearing a dress for her cousin’s quinceañera party mortifies her. 

 

With her character Adriana, Tisha Reichle-Aguilera has created a heroine that breaks the pattern of heteronormative narrative in traditional YA novels, where the girly-girl falls for the cutest boy. 

 

Adriana learns from her mistakes and choices. She grows to understand her mother’s mental issues although their relationship never smooths out completely. The young heroine uses her superb life skills to solve most of the difficult situations in which she finds herself and to manage her financial limitations. Adriana has her friends’ backs. The novel breaks all patterns of expectations for a Chicana teenager growing up in a small town in rural California in the 80s. 

 

Breaking Pattern stays with me as a debut YA novel relevant to a young population that is increasingly concerned with issues of class, gender, and mental health. The heroine is driven to achieve goals far away from romantic relationships. By placing the characters in a high school context, with academic issues like those of the target audience, the author gains their trust while introducing the peculiar world of the junior rodeo competitions. The reader will dislike some characters (the wealthy and handsome kid who cheats, coerces, and manipulates others in a fruitless effort to win competitions). They will also feel conflicted about more complicated characters like the mother. All ends well, for the young heroine.

 

Breaking Pattern deserves a place alongside the best equestrian stories: Black Beauty, The Horse Whisperer, Seabiscuit, My Friend Flicka. 

Meet Our Guest Reviewer

Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual author and an avid reader. Her debut book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017) explores the intersection between immigration and mental health. 

Coiman's poetry collection, Uprising / Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press, 2021) raises awareness of the humanitarian crisis in her homeland. 

Lisbeth Coiman's book reviews have been published in the New York Journal of Books, in Citron Review and The Compulsive Reader, LibroMobile, and Cultural Daily. 

She lives in Los Angeles, where she works and hikes.

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