Gift Horse
- Eshani Surya
- School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Penn Engineering)
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Independent Creative Production Grant
In Surya’s sophomore novel, Gift Horse, she recontextualizes the mythos of the “wild” Chincoteague ponies, best known through Marguerite Henry’s 1947 children’s book, Misty of Chincoteague, through a chronically ill protagonist. Gift Horse illuminates how the Chincoteague ponies are part of a dichotomy of care alongside another group of ponies that live on the same island–the latter roam their land freely but are given no medical treatment except for contraception, while the former are given extensive medical treatments so their foals can be sold off to fund the area’s fire department.
As this protagonist grapples both with her personal struggles as a disabled artist, mother, partner, and worker, and with the disparity in how these animals are impacted by human intervention, she becomes obsessed with a filly from Chincoteague and attempts to liberate her to Assateague, leading to a series of unanticipated consequences, and a reckoning with how American stewardship of nature unveils how the country’s most marginalized members are forced to navigate opaque institutions, painful procedures, and conflicting American values to carve out their lives under the guise of freedom.