I'm reading The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss. It's a historical novel set in 1917-1918 western US. I tend to read a lot of old books, so a historical novel feels odd; the narrator has all this hindsight, all this knowledge about what is going to happen in the future, which is not something you would get from a novel that was actually written a 100 years ago.

But in any case, I had expected too much from this book. I read The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss a few years ago, and the portrayal of all the main characters in that novel was so psychologically true, they felt like real people, and I wouldn't have been too surprised if they had walked out of the book and said hi. The Hearts of Horses is quite different; the characters are a bit too simple and too "complete" to feel real. There was a 10 year gap between these two books, so maybe Molly Gloss changed her mind about how she wanted to do her character-writing in the intervening years. Or maybe the psychological realism of The Dazzle of Day was just a fluke...