‘Dancer’ has Dickensian spirit

Reading Jojo Moyes’ newest novel, “The Horse Dancer,” I had to keep reminding myself that I was not, in fact, reading Dickens. There’s the seedy section of East London. There are adults involved in nefarious activities. There are stark differences between the gilded lives of the wealthy and the turbulent lives of the poor. And there is the resilient, quick-thinking orphan who outmaneuvers adults so deftly that it’s occasionally hard to believe she is only 14 years old. But then again, as Moyes is quick to remind us, children are surprisingly resourceful when their backs are up against a wall.

In this case, the wall is attached to a stable, the stable home to Sarah’s enduring passion: a horse named Boo. This reader had to suspend her disbelief just a little bit to believe that Sarah’s grandfather could get a piece of the finest horseflesh in the world to a stable a stone’s throw from a housing project. And then a little bit more to believe that this elderly man could train the girlhorse duo to perform complex movements that adults spend their entire lives perfecting.

But that’s the magic of “The Horse Dancer”: Characters are thrown into situations as surprising as they are compelling. Moyes writes so masterfully of the communion between horse and rider that she manages to make Le Cadre Noir, the exclusive French riding school, a realistic goal for young Sarah.

Early in the novel when Sarah’s grandfather has a stroke, in step Mac and Natasha, a couple in the throes of a very long divorce. Although they are not entirely capable of saving the girl from her desperate situation, they are willing to try. And so we jump between the upwardly mobile world of Natasha and Mac, who own a house in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood, and the seedy world of Maltese Sal, who conducts illegal harness racing when he’s not terrorizing children.

Much of the book is concerned with how children complicate and enlarge the lives of the adults who care for them, either by choice or circumstance.

As in “Me Before You,” her best-selling 2012 novel, Moyes writes convincingly of how money determines destiny and also of what happens when tragedy befalls good, or at least average, people. Her vision of people lifted from despair by nothing more than love (and a little money) is nothing if not poignant.