PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: April 28, 1997
Equine funerals help frame this brutally lyrical first novel, a tale of sibling loyalty, madness, pain and redemption. The first is that of a stuffed animal after the suicide of narrator Ella Ginsberg's sister, who was 11 when she hanged herself. The other is that of a game horse that carries Ella on a mission of rescue and self-discovery. Ella's brother Simon vanishes in the desert two months shy of his 43rd birthday, leaving his clothes and personal effects strewn next to a railroad track. His disappearance is made more inexplicable by the fact that he had always been the rock of the family, the one who held the highly dysfunctional unit together. Ella sets out to find him, tracking him across the Navajo reservation in Arizona. Meanwhile, she also journeys back through her pained memories, piecing together the sad events of their childhood. Ultimately, she finds that the years of control necessary to maintain an emotional equilibrium have been too much for Simon, who finally snapped, and that she--seemingly most damaged--has been the unacknowledged source of strength. In this restrained but compelling narrative, Hyde movingly conveys the toll of years of emotional damage.

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: July 27, 1997
Every true work of art creates a world subject to its own laws. San Luis Obispo writer Catherine Ryan Hyde's enchanting first novel, "Funerals for Horses," adroitly illustrates that point.

The book blends the narrator's realistic bout of mental illness with a quixotic search through the desert for her missing brother. Far from raising skepticism, this juxtaposition--of the stuff of reality with that of fable and epic journey--results in a compelling evocation of a world in which hidden purposes abound and all creatures of goodwill are linked by subterranean currents of understanding and sympathy.

Narrator Ella Ginsberg believes that she is a horse trapped in a human body, burdened with a human mind. She thinks the touch of her father and mother transmits a lethal disease, and in times of stress her sight closes down to a pinpoint of light. An acute if embattled observer, never greedy despite her enormous need for love and solace, Ella is saved by her dry wit and determination not to let down those who care about her.

Ella is helped by a talkative dead sister, a kindly psychologist, an 87-year-old black woman, several Navajos, a rabbit spirit guide and a wise old mare. Some make appearances in Ella's odyssey. Some aid her in the rescue of a lost soul, Ella's mad brother, Simon, who left his clothing in a field and vanished, wearing only his under shorts.

Going on intuition and a desperate optimism, Ella sets out on an eastward journey through California and Nevada, trying to trace Simon's steps. Sometimes following a hawk or rabbit, sometimes instinct, Ella travels barefoot. "I am filled with a new sense of hope," she says, "the thought that I will find my way now, because the soles of my feet will know things about where I must go. I decide that walking in shoes was like walking blindfolded." The illusion is brief. Her feet badly damaged, she has to protect them with hiking boots two sizes too large, provided by a kind stranger.

In alternating chapters of flashbacks, we learn Simon and Ella's remarkable story. Their father abandons them--following one too many arrests for indecent exposure--and their mother withdraws from the family to devote herself to her bedridden, neurotic mother-in-law. Simon at age 12 is left to raise his two younger sisters, Ella and DeeDee. After DeeDee kills herself, the siblings make a commitment to keep her alive in their minds--a decision 9-year-old Ella takes seriously.

Though Ella almost dies on her journey, the desert also brings encounters with helpful strangers and a growing spiritual awareness. A Navajo gives her a ride, and his wife feeds her.

After dinner Everett and I sit out in the dirt in front of his new house," she says, "Everett smoking and taking notice of the constellations. I want to explain the void it fills in me, how the smallest scrap of hospitality grows to cover vast needs, but it's so much more than Everett would say. Some things, he teaches me with his silence, we must trust others to know."

Yozzy, Everett's old mare, an animal full of grace and dignity, becomes Ella's guide and companion over the long final miles. The novel's warmth and charm glow brightest when Ella and Yozzy support each other in their struggle for survival on their impossible quest. At a watering stop, Ella fills plastic bottles, and Yozzy drinks. "Before I hoist the bottles onto her back again, I apologize to her. For the difficulty of the journey, all hers. For the danger. For the miles. For the load."

The day before DeeDee's death, she made Ella promise to give her beloved toy horse a proper funeral if anything happened to her. Without her, she tells Ella, he would be dead. "Absolutely he would. What would he be without me?" A quarter of a century later, Ella wonders what she would be without Simon. "I hear DeeDee's voice in my head...She says, 'But you wouldn't be dead. Would you?' Of course I would. Without Simon? Absolutely I would. What would I be without Simon?" What and who she is becomes only one of the things Ella discovers in this moving novel of mourning, celebration and salvation.

- Evelin Sullivan, author of "Games of the Blind" and "Four of Fools"

SMALL PRESS: July/August 1997 (Featured Review)
Ella Ginsberg, the viewpoint character in Catherine Ryan Hyde's powerfully compelling psychodrama, says God doesn't kick in as a deity until His children reach age eighteen. [Hyde] supports this notion by showing how Ella was abandoned and betrayed as a child.

In her brilliantly wrought, finely plotted first novel, Hyde sends Ella into the Sonoran desert to find her missing brother whom she adopted many years before as her interim God. Ella's red rock journey detours through a parallel hell as we flash back to her terrorized childhood and explore the depths of her mental illness.

An established academic author, Catherine Ryan Hyde is a masterful craftswoman with a writing professor's precise draftsmanship. Every scene is sketched with beautiful brevity, to keep the yarn spinning and to detail only that which hones the tale and enthralls the reader. Every vista takes your breath away, but a satsifying sense of clarity and order prevails even through the worst of the craziness.

Ella's sister DeeDee's suicide is buried in her beleaguered unconscious, but DeeDee's toy horse, whose funeral did seem real, arises from the grave as Ella's alterego. In the depths of her psychosis, Ella believes she is a horse in a human body. She goes to pieces when she accepts consciously that her sister is dead. The counterbalance to this wrenching scene is the superplot of the novel, which pits Ella against hopeless odds as the only person who believes her older brother is still alive.

Will she find him, with her fragile emerging ego as her only gauge of reality? Hyde selects an appropriate metaphor for this question. Ella's Native American mentor says her guide is not the hawk but the rabbit--Lewis Carroll's memorable symbol for madness, and the adjective that inspired the adjective "hare-brained." Ella's transportation for the last leg of her impossible journey is Yozzy, an ancient mare who will die along with Ella's insanity. Both will have served their purpose and fulfilled the unexpected promise of the title.

- Katherine Green

LIBRARY JOURNAL: August 1997 (Starred Review)
Ella Ginsberg, the narrator of this debut novel, comes from a dysfunctional home: her sister commits suicide, her mother descends into psychosis, and her father is imprisoned. Ella, who feels she was "born the wrong species," escapes into her own private world and is protected by her brother, Simon, who takes over the parental reins in their dissolving family. As a growing adult, Ella discovers the tragedy of her abnormal behavior through the help of a therapist. Simon, on the other hand, who never dealt with the horrors in their family, disappears one day without warning from what appears to be a happy family and a successful career. Ella embarks on a journey to recover her brother, and in a series of dramatic episodes, learns to accept her past and move on with her life. Hyde, a noted short story writer, successfully offers a rich blend of metaphors and genuine characters that will touch the hearts of readers. Highly recommended for all collections.

- David A. Berona, University of New England, Biddleford, Maine