TERRI SCHLICHENMEYER The Bookworm Sez Advertisement

If you could live out your dreams, what kind of job would you want to have?

Would you find employment in traveling the world and seeing places you've only read about? Or would you work with people who need you and your expertise?

In her imagination, 17-year-old Martha Lessen always saw herself a little wild, riding a horse at breakneck speed across a wide-open span of belly-high grass. Now that the Great War is on, though, such thoughts need to be shelved.

In the new book "The Hearts of Horses," by Molly Glass, Martha learns that the best of dreams are those that spring from reality.

Swept up in patriotic fervor and looking for adventure, almost every young man in eastern Oregon, it seemed, was signing up to go to war. Martha Lessen, seeing opportunity and wanting to escape her father's abuse, set out on her own in search of work she saw to be available.

Used to sleeping in barns, willing to eat lunch from the back of a mount, Martha knew there would be ranches in need of able bodies, and she knew horses. Turning a wild, half-tame gelding or mare into a stock horse was usually men's work, but Martha was good at it.

She'd apprenticed to a man who taught her that soft words and speaking a horse's language worked better than a whip.

Riding a circle, working with an animal for a few hours a day and returning to the same ranch every night would pay well, and it would be decent work. It wasn't hard to find six or seven Elwha County families with horses to break. It wasn't hard to find someone to trust a young girl with talent.

But this was 1917 and though there was no electricity in the county, there was fear. Anyone with a German accent was scorned. Cancer was a terrifying scourge, and alcohol, even in a dry county, was frighteningly easy to get.

Much as she liked everyone she met, though, this was little matter to Martha. As soon as the job was done, she'd be off to another part of the country. She focused on the idea that a patient person could make a patient animal. Horses only needed to learn trust. The rest was easy.

The same could be said about a skittish girl.

Wow.

It's been a long time since I've read a novel that's as beautiful as "The Hearts of Horses."

From the first page to the last word, author Molly Gloss has a way of making each sentence mean everything in Martha's story.

Her lush descriptions of the wild but quickly disappearing countryside make you feel as if you're standing in tall hillside grass, but the brutality she describes keeps this book from flying off into make-believe.

There was, in short, not one part of this book I didn't love.

If you or your book group is looking for the next must-have novel, grab "The Hearts of Horses" and dig in. This is one book you shouldn't dream of missing.

"The Hearts of Horses" by Molly Gloss, Houghton Mifflin, $24, 289 pages.