KEPT ANIMALS

By Kate Milliken

Coming-of-age is hard in any place, at any time, but in the Topanga Canyon of Kate Milliken’s debut novel, “Kept Animals,” it’s a volatile concatenation of class, beauty, vulnerability and desire. Rory Ramos, a high schooler and stable hand, comes out to her family and experiences her first explosive love in legendary Topanga Canyon — a fraught, enchanted seam of earth connecting the Porsche glamour of Malibu with the dogged ordinariness of the San Fernando Valley. Milliken beautifully portrays this combustible social biome among the live oak, eucalyptus and chaparral lining nearby hillsides.

The novel begins with the Old Topanga fire of 1993, which burned for over a week and destroyed hundreds of homes. From there, Milliken takes us backward, examining the evolution of the area’s intricate social mix from an artist-hippie haven in the 1960s to the cheek-by-jowl juxtaposition of rich and poor in the 1990s. She shows readers how old money mingles with new money; how rural ranch hands and landowners share dusty roads with movie stars, all living in precarious coexistence. It’s telling that the book’s central location is an equestrian center at a ranch called Leaning Rock.

Rory works as an exercise girl at Leaning Rock, where her stepfather, Gus, is the stable manager. His relationship with her mother, Mona, is strained (among other tensions, Mona disapproves of Gus’s enthusiasm for taxidermy) and, between the complicated family dynamic and the difficulty of navigating Topanga’s hierarchies, Rory has turned shy and secretive. Her childhood survival strategy — hard work and invisibility — begins to fray when she is befriended by June Fisk, a competitive equestrienne who is the lesbian daughter of a prominent Malibu plastic surgeon and twin of the arrogant, homophobic Wade.