Fragile Beasts by Tawni O’Dell

Review by Mary Harwood

Crown, 2010

A rich, eccentric old woman who keeps a vicious bull in her pasture. Two teen-aged boys who have lost their father in an horrific car accident fueled by alcohol and abandoned by their mother. When these two worlds collide, long-kept secrets break open old scars.

The story starts with Candace Jack as a young woman begging for the life of the bull that has just fatally gored her lover, the great matador El Soltero. Death becomes a theme that runs through each character’s plot line. Candace has never stopped mourning El Soltero and keeps her home as a shrine to him. She decorates with bullfighting posters and has a Spanish cook/houseman, Luis, who serves almost exclusively Spanish cuisine. In her pasture, she keeps a giant, perfect specimen of a bull, the offspring of Calladito, the bull who killed Soltero yet she saved from the ignoble death outside of the ring. As we learn from El Soltero, there are only two ways for a bullfighter to die: “in the ring and out of the ring.” Candace believes the same is true for great bulls. She breeds new bulls from Calladito’s sperm, cultivating the one offspring that most matches his fire. But otherwise, she remains remote in her home, purposefully cut off from the world.

Kyle and Klint, the two teenagers, are dealing with the death of their father in very different ways. Kyle wants to be an artist. His brother is a gifted baseball player. Two sons of a beer-guzzling janitor – the favorite son is easy to predict. However, Klint speaks little throughout the book yet looms over his brother’s story as well as Candace Jack’s. Shelby, Candace’s neice, has a crush on Klint and Kyle has a crush on her. Shelby comes up with a plan to keep the boys from moving to Arizona to live with their mother, who really doesn’t want them. She convinces her aunt to take them in. Candace is reluctant at first, but when challenged by the boys’ mother, she handles it by literally paying for them and becoming their legal guardian.

In some ways, the plot is predictable. Lonely, eccentric rich woman takes in two orphaned boys from the wrong side of the tracks and opens up, takes them as her own children she never had. However, it goes beyond the hackneyed to incorporate unexpected twists of painful secrets and unexpected loves. Interwoven with rich scenes of the world of the bullring (in part through letters from El Soltero’s grandnephew, now a famous bullfighter), Kyle’s blossoming as an artist and Klint’s retreat into himself are the stories of the two men who have loved, and kept, in their way, Candace for almost 60 years – Luis, the houseman and cook and Bert, her lawyer who sends yellow roses like clockwork.

This is a wonderfully crafted novel that also teaches us lessons in how to live and how to die. In the end, the fragile beasts are not bulls – they are us.

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