Book Review: Kick the Latch

Kick the Latch
by Kathryn Scanlan
Review by Rosa

Not quite fiction and not quite non-fiction, Kick the Latch tells the story of Sonia as she grows into her career at the racetrack. While full of brutality and camaraderie, love and violence, big life experiences -both the shared and the lonely-, and plenty of idiosyncratic personalities, at first, I did find that it lacked a ‘wow’ moment. However, once I settled into the fact that no one big climactic event was going to happen, I found these snippets which tribute Sonia’s existence the perfect example of an ordinary life made extraordinary. As I followed Sonia from childhood well into middle age through the everyday mundanity, gruelling work, and some unsavoury characters, her racetrack became its own little city: a microcosm full of passion that I was lucky enough to inhabit for a short period of time.