Kept animals

Kept Animals is a debut novel of desire, betrayal, and loss, centered on three teenage girls, a horse ranch, and a tragic accident. Rory Ramos is a dutiful teenager who loves photography and works as a ranch hand at the stable her stepfather manages in Topanga Canyon, California. It is a dry, dusty place that depends on horses and on hierarchies. Rory rides for the wealthy clients, among them the twins June and Wade Fisk.

June begins to take an interest in Rory, but she is more drawn to Vivian Price, the beautiful teenage daughter of a movie star, who lives down the hill. Rory cannot help noticing, since she swims in Vivian's pool nearly every night. Rory's ambiguous roots and blue-collar upbringing keep her apart from the Prices and the Fisks until her stepfather is involved in a tragic car accident. After that, the teenagers' lives become tightly linked, and it is unclear whether they are friends or foes, lovers or rivals. A series of events follows, building to the night a wildfire sweeps through Topanga Canyon and changes Rory's life.

The story is narrated by Rory's daughter, Charlie, twenty years after the 1993 fire. Rory is away working as a war photographer, and Charlie believes the key to her own existence lies in what happened during that unseasonably warm fall. With no one to tell her the truth, she has to piece it together on her own. The novel explores girlhood, class, and fate.