Ashley Mace Havird makes her debut with this book that Tim O’Brien called “an engrossing and enchanting story.” In May of 1964, 11-year-old Etta McDaniel’s horse, Troy, is struck by lightning, seemingly dead and gone as if the walking disaster had never come in the first place. Etta is shocked to find that Troy, though gruesomely scarred, not only survives this catastrophe, but has come out of it with supernatural powers. Etta decides she wants to use these new powers to her advantage, hoping a find of the sort her hero Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at ancient Troy will fix everything suddenly gone wrong in her life. Half-blind and crippled, the horse does lead Etta to treasure but also initiates her into a world of “action and liability” as the Civil Rights Movement takes hold in her rural South.