Sometimes I get up in the morning with a book in my head that I want to write about. This morning, it wasn’t this book; it was Vicki Hearne’s Animal Happiness or maybe her Adam’s Task. A philosopher and dog and horse trainer, both of Hearne’s books deal with the theme of the relationships between animals and man, training as a form of communication, and animal storytelling. It’s been a while since I’ve read them and, as I started to flip through them this morning to refresh my memory of them so I could write about them, I realized they had blended together in my mind. They deserve better than that, so I’ll need to read them again before writing about them.

Instead, I’m going to write about A Wind in Cairo, a fantasy that shares this much in common with Vicki Hearne’s non-fiction work: it’s about a horse, training the horse, and storytelling. In this case, however, it is about the training of a man.

A pretty useless man.

Hasan, the spoiled son of a rich and indulgent father, shirks work, parties all the time, and loses the pearl of his father’s stables in a gambling debt. Then, convinced that he can win it all back, Hasan loses more and is cast into the streets where he is beaten and left for dead. He is rescued by a wise man who brings him into his home, feeds him and helps him recover his health. Hasan, a young, strong, handsome man who tells himself that everything in this world is his to take, and that every woman wants him the way he wants them, rapes a young woman who has been nursing him. It turns out the wise man is a sorcerer and that the young woman is his beloved daughter. The wizard, realizing he has made a mistake and that kindness will not cure Hasan of this story he believes about himself, casts a spell that turns Hasan into a horse but leaves him with his human mind, and then sends him to the horse market.

Narrowly escaping gelding, and even death, Hasan is then purchased by the scion of his family’s sworn enemy, Zamaniyah, who knows something about training horses. And so begins Hasan’s life as a horse and a journey that trains him to be man, redeems him, and sets him free again.

But there is more to this story, for Zamaniyah turns out to be a woman who is facing her own challenges: her father, having lost his sons in war, is bringing her up to be his heir and, since an heir must be a man, she dresses and presents as a man. She is not transgender however, assuming this role only because her father expects her to and because she cannot inherit otherwise. And because she wants the freedom and power that being a man in medieval Egypt provides her, a freedom contrasted by the treatment of other women in the book.

Zamaniyah’s training of Khamsin (Hasan’s new name as a horse) is part of this story that ties in with Hearne’s work. For Hearne talks about the stories that horses learn from us about who they are and how they should interact with the humans that they come into contact with. In Adam’s Task, Hearne describes several horses that people bring her to “fix”. She describes taking the risk of identifying what story each horse believes, and the task of teaching it a new story, a process that doesn’t always include sugar cubes and kisses.

The processes that Zamaniyah uses when training Khamsin are similar. She outsmarts him, gets his attention, teaches him a new story about what he is capable of and who he can be, and rides him into battle. In quieter moments, Khamsin witnesses scenes and learns secrets about Zamaniyah that Hasan, a man of that time and place, wouldn’t usually be exposed to. He begins to understand women as people and recognize the magnitude of the crime that caused his curse.

I believe strongly in the power of storytelling to change a person’s trajectory. When I used to volunteer with an organization that fostered policy debate programs in underserved high schools, I witnessed teens whose families had never gone to college, learn a new story about who they were and what they could achieve, stories that took them to top-notch schools across the U.S. I’ve seen young colleagues figure out how to tell a different story about what a manager should be, and grow into that. And I’ve watched people learn the wrong stories, stories about how they have failed, how they’ll never be anything because they chose not to follow a path that their parents laid out for them. Or because they seized on a story at the wrong time in their life and printed it so strongly on their brain that it colors every interaction they have with the people around them and the events that happen in their life.

It’s hard to overcome the power of a strong story. You have to be careful to craft your own story, a story that allows you to take the path you want, and not allow others to define your story for you. I’ve made the mistake, once or twice, of letting people change my story to something that served their purposes but didn’t support me and where I wanted to go. When you do this, you give up power over your life. The only way to regain agency is to craft a new story, one that will take you on a journey that you want to be on.

Hasan learns a new story in this book, a story that allows him to change. He learns Zamaniyah’s story and the stories of her friends, which changes how he sees the people around him, allows him to see them as people, which also changes his story.

What story do you tell about yourself? Is that the story that you want engraved on your tomb someday?