.LaraPriorPalmer’s breathless debut records her journey with equal parts wit and bravado, modesty and despair.
Lara Prior-Palmer was surfing the internet when she discovered the Mongol Derby: “a 1,000-kilometer race on twenty-five wild ponies…that mimicked Chinggis Khan’s postal system but seemed from afar more like a perfect hodgepodge of Snakes and Ladders and the Tour de France on unknown bicycles.
Prior-Palmer’s breathless debut, Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race, records her journey with equal parts wit and bravado, modesty and despair. From the very beginning we know that Palmer not only wins the grueling race but becomes “the youngest person and the first female ever to have done so.
ADVERTISEMENT The narrative is also compelled by the why that lies at the heart of any adventure story. As she puts it, “We had been given ten days to ride twenty-five semiwild ponies a long way around Mongolia. Why the need to go all that way and do such a thing?” Prior-Palmer admits to the life-planning bewilderment of a typical twenty-something, but also a fear of “falling into the routines of my elders—their eggshell worlds of dangers and do-nots.
The thread of her haughty American competition, a woman named Devan, as well as a potential romance with the race veterinarian that Prior-Palmer leaves blessedly unresolved, weave some needed interest into the ten largely monotonous days on horseback. But nothing compels so much as Prior-Palmer’s voice, so many striking examples of which appear on every page that it’s futile to underline them all. Flighty almost to a fault, the narration is nearly overtaken by self-deprecation .
Rough Magic takes its title from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the themes of which Prior-Palmer draws on at several points in her narrative. “I’m still amazed I took something so highbrow as The Tempest in my backpack—without caring, without meaning it to mean anything,” she admits. But then she realizes she likes “the way it sounds, feminine and free.” The same can be said of her own journey, a fierce and feminine addition to the great history of British travel writing. #cf_5 .
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