Discoveries

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The God of Animals

Aryn Kyle

Scribner: 320 pp., $25

NOVELS are wonderful for playing out the mistakes parents make. “The God of Animals” reminds this reader of Mona Simpson’s “Anywhere But Here” and Tobias Wolff’s “This Boy’s Life.” We meet Alice Winston, who is 12, that powerful, pivotal age between childhood and adulthood. She helps her father, a horse trainer who has reluctantly begun to take on boarders (horses owned by wealthy women) and students (children of wealthy parents) to make ends meet. Alice’s mother is “sad” and spends most of her time upstairs in her room. Alice sees, with acute clarity, the life-threatening faults of the adults around her as they fail her, one by one.

This is Aryn Kyle’s first novel, begun as a short story (“Foaling Season”) initially published in the Atlantic Monthly. Many fine writing careers have begun with a wild lack of control; this is not the case with Kyle, who is a seamless storyteller. She can be hard on the heartstrings (each chapter ending with an emotional kick in the stomach), but the structure is as strong as a well-made fence, despite the many story threads and characters. It will be wonderful to watch her write more and more subtle fiction and to relax into the arms of her own competence.

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The Mad Hot Adventures of an Unlikely Documentary Filmmaker

Amy Sewell

Hyperion: 192 pp., $12.95 paper

WHAT an inspiration -- a book about how a regular person got a great idea for a project and made it happen -- complete with notes at the end of each chapter: how to make your own documentary film; how to come up with a concept; how to raise funds; how to get copyrights and clearances; how to film, edit and edit market it, even a checklist of equipment and costs, it’s all here. Amy Sewell’s “The Mad Hot Adventures of an Unlikely Documentary Filmmaker” is like a well-written cookbook.

Sewell is straightforward, humble and surprised at her success, and she delights at the idea that anyone can do it. “Mad Hot Ballroom,” the film, came out of a column she wrote for her local paper, the Tribeca Trib, about neighborhood fifth-graders taking a mandatory semester of ballroom dancing. She was 45 when she wrote the column, with 5-year-old twin daughters and a midlife crisis on the horizon. “It was a toast,” she writes of the award-winning documentary, which cost $725,000, “to the purist definition of independent filmmaking and to the purist definition of documentary filmmaking.”

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Too Close to the Sun

The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

Sara Wheeler

Random House: 320 pp., $27.95

AT 6 feet 3, with a strikingly handsome face, Denys Finch Hatton was the result of generations of breeding among London mandarins. He was not bred for failure. Yet as Sara Wheeler notes in her introduction to “Too Close to the Sun,” Finch Hatton, born in 1887 and immortalized in Isak Dinesen’s “Out of Africa,” “witnessed at first hand the marginalization of his class when agricultural interests were overtaken by economic modernization.”

Wheeler doesn’t fall prey to the posthumous charms of her subject, who died in a plane crash in 1931 when he was just 44. She cuts a path through the many entertaining if often obfuscating anecdotes to locate the spiritual heart of the man. He was “the open road made flesh.” Her fieldwork in Africa and her writings on traveling and travelers give her a crucial restraint, and make her imagining of moments in his life all the more vivid: “The plane circled twice and turned in the direction of Nairobi. As it was still gaining height, the engine faltered. The Moth plummeted out of sight of the spectators and crashed a mile away, close to Mwakangale Hill. On impact, it burst into flames. When all the fuel was burned up and the fire began to go cold, three black oranges rolled out of the fuselage.”