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Review: Rough Magic

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Title: Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race Author: Lara Prior-Palmer Publication Info: May 2019, Catapult. 288 pages. Source: Library digital resources Publisher's Blurb: For fans of Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk , this is the extraordinary debut memoir of a young woman who traveled to Mongolia to compete in the world’s longest, toughest horse race, and emerged as its youngest and first-ever female winner. At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to “the world’s longest, toughest horse race”—an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that recreates the horse messenger system developed by Geng