Sometimes I think I should listen to my ten-year-old self more often.

Whisper Goodbye
by Dorothy Nafus Morrison
1985

I could not get into this book. I tried. I failed. I sort of predicted this. Way back when, I had a copy of the sequel to this book, Whisper Again, and I could never make myself care about it either. However, I do have a few bullet points for this book, because I did sort of skim through it in a bored, lackadaisical manner.

Katie is forced to make the most difficult decision of her life when her grandparents decide to move. Should she move with them or remain with the horse she loves more than anything else in the world?

Katie does not want to move away to Portland. She hates the idea of leaving her school, her friends--and especially her horse.

Katie has trained her horse since birth, and now she's ready to compete in the rodeo. But Katie has lived with her grandparents since her own parents died, and she knows how much they love and depend on her.

It takes a major disaster to help Katie make her difficult choice.

Naturally, I find this summary hilarious. The first two paragraphs are essentially the same paragraph, sort of indicating to me that the summary writer was as bored with this book as I was. Katie is moving! Katie is moving to Portland...did we mention that?

Let's see if I can break this down:

#1. Katie's town is being flooded and moved to make way for a reservoir.
#2. The generic version of Wal-Mart is moving in, threatening Katie's grandfather's pharmacy, thus Katie's grandfather decides to move to Portland.
#3. Katie freaks out.
#4. Katie feels back about freaking out. Then she breaks her foot.
#5. Katie tries to find a boarding stable in Portland, but fails.
#6. Something happens, and Katie realizes that family is more important than horses.
#7. Katie sells Whisper to this girl named Stacy.
#8. Katie gets into gymnastics and moves to Portland.

That's it! Mostly.

• I would have really liked this book if it had been at all interesting. The ending is pretty cool, considering most horse stories bend over backward to allow a perfect OMGYAY ending for the main character. You don't get that this time around. Katie just finally accepts that she can't bring Whisper with her and moves on without throwing a fit.

• Perfect grammar! Wow, no one talks like that. If someone else said the word "shall" I thought I was going to go mad.

• Katie has a friend who uses the word "utterly" every other page. That also drove me a little mad.

So it's not my kind of book. I still intend to try out the sequel, just to see if I can jog my memory and confirm if I ever attempted to read it.

I just don't know, you guys. I don't.

Hercules: A Matter of Trust
by Heather Brooks
2009

Horse friends forever?

Emily Summers is on a mission. A scared little pony has come to Running Horse Ridge, the horse rescue ranch where she lives. Hercules desperately needs a friend, and Emily knows exactly how the lonely pony feels. She is new to Running Horse Ridge herself. But unlike Hercules, she has begun to make new friends, and she has the love of her horse friend forever, Sapphire. Can Emily get Hercules to trust her before he is beyond help?

Horse friend forever? Is that what we're calling this relationship now? Well, whatever. I'm too busy glaring at the cover of this book to care.

A Matter of Trust starts pretty much directly after whatever the first book was called left off. Emily has been at Running Horse Ridge all of maybe five days, she's still being highly annoying about Sapphire, her "horse friend forever," and her Aunt Debby still isn't letting her ride this horse. Cue whining. Emily grooms Sapphire for "several hours" and is trying her damnedest to unravel whatever training Sapphire has absorbed. The horse has a thing with pushing people with his head, and Emily thinks it's fantastic when Sapphire pushes her onto her ass. This just sounds annoying to me, but Emily is OMG DO IT AGAIN HA HA OMG about it. Ugh, it makes me want to smack her. Anyway, while Sapphire is acting like a misbehaved mutt, Debby walks up so she can be disapproving. However, she's got a surprise for Emily. How would Emily like to be in this show that suddenly exists?

Well, Emily is all OMG YES and OMG's some more when Debby asks her to show Sapphire in some halter class or something. Emily is momentarily disappointed that she won't ride Sapphire. Instead she's riding Moondance in a couple of classes, one being a maiden jumping class, and Emily is upset about this maiden terminology despite the fact that she has taken two jumping lessons. In Emily's life, that would be two jumping lessons total. Emily bitches to herself about this, because back at home she showed all the time in dressage! But no one at Running Horse Ridge respects dressage, according to Emily, and for all we know she could be right. It's that sort of childish attitude I've come to expect from these people.

So Emily keeps grooming Sapphire, which has got to be the longest grooming session in the history of horses at this point, and then bitches some more about how her aunt doesn't trust her and her father defers to her aunt too much. Frankly, Emily has done absolutely nothing to warrant being trusted. I mean, in the week she's been at this place she's only broken every rule in the book and thrown a massive fit whenever anyone talks about selling Sapphire. She does take some time to acknowledge that she has acted horribly annoying, but this to a person like Emily is not justification. So Emily decides to step it up a little and goes out to find this pony, Hercules, who is all abused and shell shocked. Nothing happens with the pony that is important until right around the end, so let's ignore him and move on to Emily whining some more.

Debby and her dad, Scott, are working with the foal Emily was given. Holy hell, let's freak out! How can she learn if she's not there to watch? Normally I would agree with this, but this is Emily, so I completely understand their motives. Blah blah, Emily decides she's alone at Running Horse Ridge, blah.

To the show! Things don't go well for Emily, she's too late to show Sapphire in his class, which she realizes is just a giant advertisement for buyers, and then falls off before she can even get to her jumping class and is whisked off to the hospital. She's okay, but falling off has put the fear of jumping in her, and so she goes through most of the second portion of the book refusing to jump, making the excuse that her back hurts too much. She also has a giant falling out with her father, doesn't feel like she fits in at all, and is generally starting to detach from the family. Things are not helped when her father refuses to go home to New Jersey, and has actually given up the lease on the fabulous horse she had there to this never seen arch nemesis, because keeping people in the dark is the best policy!

Eventually Scott and Debby decide to so something and come up with this trail ride that gets everyone together and includes Emily. At some point, I think Hercules gets in trouble and is saved. Really, he wasn't important. Then Debby makes her come to the barn for a lesson, and when Emily gets there she finds out that she's going to ride Sapphire. And then Sapphire practically grows wings and they do everything perfectly.

• She'd been working so hard to prove herself to her aunt, to show she was worthy of being trusted with animals even though she came from a dressage barn... Ha Ha WHAT? Since when does dressage equal incompetence?

• Again, it's actually written well. This is what makes these reviews so painful, because it just so happens that I hate most of the characters. The only two characters I like are Meredith (random boarder at the barn) and Emily's dad.
  

• Despite being well written, the premise still makes me roll my eyes. What sort of crazy family is this? Why would they just move in the same house with these people and live there indefinitely? Really, the only way I can see this working is if Emily's dad happens to be independently wealthy, because that's how he acts.
  

• I would love to see Sapphire sold. It's sort of my new "that would be awesome!" plot that almost never happens.
  

The next book in this series comes out this summer, giving me a nice long break before delving back into this madness.

I dislike horse racing mysteries, but here we are anyway.

Hugger Mugger
A Spenser Novel
by Robert B. Parker
2001

You may wonder where I was the past week, in which case I could not tell you. I was around, doing things, not even taking a horse related media break. I don't know. Couldn't tell ya.

Spenser is back and embroiled in a deceptively dangerous and multi-layered case: someone has been killing racehorses at stables across the south, and the Boston P.I. travels to Georgia to protect the two-year old destined to become the next Secretariat. When Spenser is approached by Walter Clive, president of the Three Fillies Stables, to find out who is threatening his horse Hugger Mugger, he can hardly say no: he's been doing pro bono work for so long his cupboards are just about bare. Disregarding the resentment of the local Georgia law enforcement, Spenser takes the case. Though Clive has hired a separate security firm, he wants someone with Spenser's experience to supervise the operation. Despite the veneer of civility, Spenser encounters tensions beneath the surface southern gentility. The case takes an even more deadly turn when the attacker claims a human victim, and Spenser must revise his impressions of the Three Fillies organization - and watch his own back as well.

Horse racing in Georgia, you say? I think all that needs to be said about the state of the Georgia Thoroughbred breeding and racing industry is that they're all excited about Together Forever getting an Eclipse Award. Together Forever, apparently, being bred in Kentucky by Georgians. Good on you, Georgia!

I got Hugger Mugger as an audio book, not having any idea what was in store for me. Joe Mantegna is the voice of our main character, Spenser, which instantly transforms him from macho Boston man to macho New Jersey gangster. Interestingly, he makes no attempt to replicate a Boston accent for this guy when he is all about trying for Southern accents with the other characters, and most of the Southern accents manage to transform every character into a coquettish 12-year-old girl who cannot stop asking questions.

Anyway, I really don't think this book really deserves a recap or a review, quite bluntly. It's a book in a string of Spenser books, of which I know none but, obviously, this one. Spenser is a P.I., who is hired by these people in Georgia, so he goes down there to investigate the horse shootings and predictably pisses off a couple of Southern men because he's an asshole. And the guy who hired him gets killed and the guy's daughter tells him to go home because obviously the police can handle this and Spenser is not wanted. Totally not telling! Totally.

Spenser goes home to Boston so he can help this random girl get back together with her abusive boyfriend. Nice way to be an enabler, Spenser! Well done.

Then this woman who calls herself a courtesan, but is basically just a whore, even though she expressly says she is not a whore, but come on, shows up in Boston to hire Spenser and send him back to Georgia so he can investigate the Three Fillies family and figure out who killed Walter Clive, because his courtesan/whore/mistress has a son by him and she was cut out of the will, suspiciously enough. Blah blah, things happen, people die, others are scarred for life, and it comes down to the revelation that Walter Clive's youngest daughter had him killed when she discovered that her dad was going to revise his will and place his illegitimate son as the sole heir of Three Fillies. So after this random shoot out with these people hired as security for Three Fillies, everyone is hauled down to the police station so they can figure everything out and have a nice, long chat. No one implicates the youngest daughter in the murder, but they know she did it, so the security guy takes the fall for the entire thing and rich, completely crazy daughter flounces out of the police station. Security guy mutters something about having screwed over women his entire life, and then bemoans that he finally had to pick a crazy one to fall in love with. Spenser is like "yeah, that's too bad." And the book ends abruptly, just like that.

• From this book, you could assume that all Southern women are whores or completely insane. Of Walter Clive's three daughters, two are nymphomaniacs and one is so celibate she forces her nympho sisters to "clean" themselves after daddy dies. By this I mean she shears off their hair and drugs them so they can do nothing but stare at a wall.

• Also, one of the nympho sisters married a pedophile. No one bothers to really point out the giant flaw that is this marriage's existence, but because she is so sexually frustrated by her husband's not being attracted to her, she decides to become an escort. Not only that, she decides to let the escort service "place" her at a truck stop so she can perform blow jobs for $30 each. I...do not understand any of this. Although I especially love the fact that everyone has this uncontrollable urge to sooth the pedophile's feelings.

• Hugger Mugger runs in the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga. There is a detailed description of this race, wherein it reads like Hugger Mugger beat up a couple of horses on his way to the finish line. If you're going to run up and smack back and forth between two horses in the homestretch, you're going to get an inquiry and you're going to wind up disqualified.

I don't know. It was entertaining for taking up my commuting time. That's pretty much it.

Dancer: If some horse books are fantasies, this one is literal.

Dancer: A Novel
by Shelley Peterson
1996

First of all, I think it's worthwhile to say that one review pointed out that this book is "as ingenuous as early Nancy Drew" and that is pretty spot on. Therefore I'm going to have to let go of some of the serious WTF? moments that this book strings along at a consistent rate, because Dancer is 100% pure horse story fantasy. Fantasy as pure as the driven snow. That sort of pure that makes you feel a little sick after being exposed to it for a lengthy amount of time. I'm actually going to tag this as fantasy, because I've got two ghostly visits and a haunted riding crop that tell me it is.

Second, if reaction to my giveaway post concerning Dancer is any indication (not to mention this book's Amazon page), there are some pretty basic schools of thought when it comes down to Shelley Peterson. Either you like her, or you just don't. I have no fond childhood nostalgia for this book, nor am I Canadian, so I really have to go with whatever impression comes to me first, and with Dancer it's that I think this book is mainly exceptionally strange.

Hilary James ('Mousie') is just sixteen when she wins The Fuller Trophy at the Royal Winter Fair jumping her horse, Dancer. Her triumph is rewarded with an invitation to perform in England for Queen Elizabeth, but she has also attracted the unwanted attention of the nefarious Samuel Owens who schemes to acquire Dancer for his niece, Sara. Rebuffed in his first attempt to buy the horse, Owens instructs his hired man, Chad Smith, to try to steal it. Mousie has a dream in which a beautiful blond horsewoman warns her of impending danger.

As far as summaries go, this one is horrible. However, it had no hope of being good, so I'm just going to give whoever wrote it points for trying to compound this book into four sentences.

Mousie is our heroine this time out, and the book opens up with her winning this Royal Winter Fair with her horse, Daring Dancer. Dancer is 17 hands high, a chestnut (12-year-old girls everywhere start squeeing in joy), a stallion, and acts like a human. By this I mean that he cannot be kept in a stall (he will jump out of it or knock the door down or both), chooses only to be ridden by Mousie, "bows" and basically acts like a showman in front of audiences without any command, and acts like a bodyguard (and by this I mean he will attack various intruders, but only to the point that he scares them or has them pinned to the ground). Saying that he is perfect is an understatement, because everything he does is so fantastic he's practically a mythological beast sent straight from Mt. Olympus. However, this is not all of the animal insanity. Mousie and Christine live on a farm surrounded by variously aware animals, such as the attack geese, goat, and terrier. They're all practically out of the movie Babe, only Babe, of course, was so much better.

Okay, so now you know what we're dealing with here. Mousie wins this show, getting the attention of Samuel Owens, who is this level of evil that is impossible to comprehend. He desperately wants the horse for his niece, Sara, and dispatches his trainer, Chad, to convince them to sell. Of course, they do not sell because Dancer is everything to Mousie, whose father has recently died and lives life as the social pariah of her school. Owens is not thrilled about this, so he tells Chad that he is going to get Dancer for him, no matter the cost. Chad accepts his fate and begins to plot.

Enter The Queen. This is Canada, and as some of us probably know, Canada just can't give up the pomp and circumstance of royalty. Thus they are a constitutional monarchy, meaning that some Canadians are crazy fangirls for The Queen (okay, that's not what it means...it's just a result). Shelley Peterson is clearly in this group of people, as are all of her characters. A letter from someone special arrives and informs her that The Queen is coming. OMGYAY! And not only that, Canada is going to put on some special show for her. OMGYAYAGAIN! And not only that, but Mousie has been selected to perform at this very show! Well, everyone about dies from the shock. Mousie and Dancer start to practice terribly hard, and when the show rolls around we are treated to Christine's rather ridiculously detailed description of it. Meanwhile, important stuff is going on with Mousie that we don't hear about until well after the fact. I have never encountered this sort of storytelling before, but it made me want to take the book and throw it at Shelley Peterson. Seriously, what? So when Mousie comes out on Dancer, and she and her saddle fly off of Dancer during the show, resulting in mass hysterics, you feel not only left out, but annoyed.

So because Dancer is a Black Stallion character, the only person who can take him home is Christine. That leaves Sandy, son of Rory, Christine's former high school flame, to go to the hospital with Mousie, who has a crush on Sandy like you would not believe. Convoluted? Maybe! Anyway, Christine leaves Dancer at the stable to go back to the hospital, relieving Sandy, who goes back to the farm with Rory to look over Dancer because Chad Smith is lurking around, being evil. When they get there, all the animals have been drugged and Dancer is gone. Sandy and Rory immediately head over the neighboring farm, conveniently owned by Owens (Rory, Christine, and Owens are all neighbors, of course), and find Dancer dyed black and drugged up in a locked barn. They escape and gallop back to Christine's. Eventually Christine and Mousie arrive home and have a good laugh because Dancer is black and wow, that's sort of amusing?

After this Rory tries to profess his true love to Christine, completely out of nowhere. He is unhappily married to the (evil, alcoholic) Helena, and is not yet divorced, but Christine doesn't know how much he wants to be divorced and turns him away. Meanwhile, Sandy has inadvertently caused a scene with Mousie by trying to take both her and the hated Sara Owens to school in the same car. How dare he! Mousie ignores Sandy for months, toiling in her friendless solitude. Or maybe she finally found a friend in these few months. I can't remember, because Shelley Peterson decided it wasn't important to show Mousie interacting with anyone, making me wonder if this friend is imaginary. Oh, yeah, and Chad Smith dies trying to euthanize Dancer. Mousie interrupts his attempt because some bleeding woman in a dream tells her to, causing Chad to fall over and accidentally stab himself in the chest with a hypodermic. Don't worry! We are assured he felt no pain, and Mousie gets over this trauma fairly quickly. Then Owens appears to inform Christine that he's a NICE GUY REALLY and she TOTALLY BELIEVES HIM because she is incomparably stupid because she is so sweet and nice. And Rory arrives to tell her all about his marriage and convince her that he'd like to date her when he's finally divorced. This pushiness, perhaps not shockingly, relieves her rather than sets her on edge. I'd be backing away slowly and/or screaming for help.

Enter The Queen. Because Queen Elizabeth just loves it when people fall off of seventeen hand horses, she invites Mousie to present Dancer to her court (or something) in England. OMGYAY! And then Mousie's grandmother sends them tons of new, fashionable clothes because they can't go to England wearing their farm rags. OMGYAYAGAIN! They wear their fashionable clothes to the airport, where they are treated to first class and all the wine and crackers they can conceivably eat. Then they are picked up in a limo and taken to the most quaint English cottage in the history of vine covered quaint English cottages. Everyone faints from sheer joy!

Dancer, of course, cannot live in their quaint surroundings, so he is relegated to some super awesome royal stables. There he still won't stay in his damned stall, freaking out one of the grooms to no end. At night, Mousie receives another dream from the bleeding lady, sending her straight to the barn, where Eddie, the unsettled groom, has roped Dancer and is freaking out. Mousie just tells Dancer to go to his stall, and he does, making Eddie look like an idiot. Only Christine then overhears Eddie nefariously plotting to steal Dancer, and wonders who could be behind this plot because surely it is not Samuel Owens! Surely! Christine has Eddie fired, thinking that's the end of it.

Enter The Queen. Mousie performs perfectly for Queen Elizabeth, and Dancer bows and rears to applause because he's that annoying. They win a pretty silver bowl. OMGYAY! Then they dance and eat with royal people and Mousie talks to The Queen. OMGYAYAGAIN! Then the royals indicate that they would really like Dancer for themselves, and Mousie goes into this long speech about how she couldn't possibly, so they relent and ask if they can breed him to their super fabulous mare. Everyone faints from sheer joy!

Then Rory and Helena get divorced and Rory speeds to England with Sandy so he can tell Christine about this. Sandy and Mousie nearly get kidnapped by Eddie, who surely couldn't be employed by Samuel Owens! Surely! Rory is not buying it that Christine keeps dealing out about Owens, not that this matters because it's fox hunt time! Sandy and Mousie get into a highly irritating conversation about the moral qualms of fox hunting, and Mousie is so for ripping those foxes to shreds but do not call her bloodthirsty, damn it! It's a totally non bloodthirsty sport! She thinks! Sandy backs down, because all horse story main characters are right and he has no hope of voicing an opinion. And then Mousie and Prince Charles fox hunt together and have a marvelous time until Eddie comes out of nowhere in an attempt to kill Dancer, but only winds up smacking his head into a tree and breaking his neck. He dies. Mousie and Prince Charles call for a doctor and then proceed with the marvelousness. And she helps some ghost get over her trauma of dying during a fox hunt. Eddie, apparently, will take her place.

Returning to Canada, time passes. Sandy and Mousie are dating, as are Rory and Christine. Samuel Owens is keeping a low profile. Sandy is learning how to ride and buys a horse so he can ride around with Mousie. Another royal letter arrives with pictures of the foal conceived between Dancer and the English Mare of Awesomeness. After about six to seven months of gestation, which makes me want to throw the book at Shelley Peterson again. Mousie dismisses the foal as scraggly and wet, wanting to hear nothing more of it because apparently she was expecting a seventeen hand, fully grown stallion to come popping out of that mare? Christine tries to explain that the foal is a day old, if that, and Mousie ignores her. Confused? You bet I was.

Then everyone goes on a ride, and Sandy's little sister falls. While Mousie is sitting with what's her name, somehow Samuel Owens comes out of nowhere, having been driven insane, and attacks Dancer with a knife. Dancer nearly dies, but of course he doesn't. Samuel Owens is hauled off, Mousie's dead dad appears to reminisce with Christine and Mousie, and then Christine and Rory get married. The end.

Okay.

Either you like Dancer for being the cute, slightly wacky fantasy it is or you dismiss it as unrealistic insanity. Here are some random thoughts (in which I don't rip it apart for being unrealistic, because really that's a waste of breath):

1. The story is invested in appearing innocent, making death practically comical or something easily risen above (Dancer's recovery that is mainly explained by his awesomeness, similar to Wonder's Pride's recovery through love in Pride's Last Race). The characters are black and white, no shades of gray to be found. Even Helena, who might have been good at some point in her life, is evil by the end of the book (drink and bitterness = evilness...remember this kids!).

2. Shelley Peterson is telling the story when she should be showing. That whole scene during The Queen's visit to Canada is the best example of this, as well as deus ex machina. Instead of showing us something relevant to whatever nonexistent plot she's trying to develop, she tells us what's going on in the show through Christine. You know what? I don't give a crap what's going on in the show. You want to know what I care about? THE DAMNED MAIN CHARACTER. Where the hell is she and what is she doing? Do I care about how much The Queen likes seeing some 8-year-old boy from Calgary rope a calf? Nope. Not at all. Then, after the hospital and the plan to dye and kidnap Dancer, Mousie tells us what happened when we were wasting our time with Christine during the show. How much do I care now? NONE AT ALL. Everyone's telling me what happened and jacking up the word count when we could have accomplished everything in half the time by just showing me what was going on with Mousie and Dancer backstage, explaining how she and the saddle fell off of Dancer in the first place.

3. There is no plot. Sure, there's (resolved immediately, yet unnecessarily drawn out) conflict. Sure, stuff happens. Sure, people do things. Mainly? It's about a year in the life of a perfect girl and her supernatural horse, in which they squee over the royals. I couldn't get into this because I ultimately saw no point to the story.

4. Relationships do not work like that! Seriously, no. Rory and Christine can get together. That's fine. Sandy and Mousie can have as much step-sibling sex as they want in the future. I don't care about that either. The whole relationship between Rory and Christine scared me, in total honesty. Rory lives a sham life with his uncaring wife, wants to get divorced but doesn't, randomly tries to tell Christine he loves her after ONE DAY of reminding each other that they exist after YEARS of separation (despite being neighbors!) and is rejected. Then they have a quick "yeah, I'm not happy and want to get divorced" discussion that lasts all of two seconds, he gets divorced, and is (practically the next day!) proposing to Christine? The hell? Who relates to anyone that way and could be called fairly normal by most people? A lot of this book can be chalked up to impatience on the part of the author, I think. This is not good, because it makes the book so much more wacky.

So that's a brief overview of my opinion. It's obviously an unrealistic story, so much so you can't even point that out as a reason to dislike it. This story totally owns up to the fact that it's unrealistic, so you can feel free to like it for its fantasy. Or you can dislike if for some of the facts which I have presented here, realism aside. Or you can dislike it for being totally and unabashedly unrealistic. Whatever you like.

Horses and feminism collide, much to the despair of the typical 1940s adult male.

Night Ride Home
by Barbara Esstman
Published: 1998

Night Ride Home and In The Presence of Horses were published around the same time. Unfortunately for me I read In The Presence of Horses first, which did a fantastic job of turning me off of horse books for a long while. Therefore, I never got around to Night Ride Home. Also, I might have ignored it because it looked just a little depressing and if you have read the horror that is In The Presence of Horses, you might swear off books after that encounter. Seriously, I hated that book. I'll have to read it again. For, you know, the blog. And stuff.

Nora Mahler leads a perfect life. With her two teenage children and husband, she thrives on running the family horse farm on the banks of the Missouri River until Simon is killed in a riding accident. Neal sends the horses away, and when Nora refuses his orders to sell the farm, he moves to Chicago, taking Clea with him. Soon after, Ozzie Kline, a horse wrangler who has longed for Nora since they were teenage lovers, helps Nora and her mother rebuild their farm. Alongside Ozzie, Nora finds a happiness she never knew with her husband and wonders if she and Ozzie have another chance with each other, until Neal returns to claim what he considers his.

You know, I could rip this summary to shreds so easily. Basically, it reads like a summary of the book as told by someone who was given the basic premise before being told to write a summary. Nora doesn't lead a perfect life at the beginning of this book. She leads what others might suspect is a perfect life, only they would be completely wrong. The book is told from a series of first person perspectives: Nora, Neal (her husband), Clea (her daughter), Ozzie, and Maggie (Nora's mom) all occurring after Simon falls off of a horse and hits a rock, dying immediately. Everyone unravels instantly: Nora has an emotional meltdown, Neal shoots the horse in the head, Clea withdraws completely, Ozzie takes off, and Maggie...actually, Maggie is the only one that sees sense.

Because Neal is a self-absorbed asshole, and medical practices back in the 40s were iffy at best, he decides that the best course of action for Nora's grief is to a) drug the life out of her and b) shock therapy! He also decides that, while Nora is in a drugged up stupor, that it's really for the best to sell the farm and move to Chicago. Because he can't sell the farm without the signature of Nora or her mother, this is put on hold, but absolutely nothing stops him from selling all the horses and spiriting Clea off to Chicago. Perfect life, right? Man, if only I can get me some of that.

As you can probably deduce from the summary, Neal's plan is foiled by those gosh darn women doing what they damn well please, thereby ruining his life because Nora is no longer running around making Neal feel better about himself (if she ever did, because I really don't think she ever did, which was one of Neal's sticking points and why he kept acting like a toddler in the midst of a tantrum all the time), or whatever the hell it was Neal really wants. I have a feeling he wanted a subservient wife who baked cupcakes all day, taking time out of her busy baking schedule to either "take care" of her children or give him a blow job. I really have no idea what he was going for, but Nora never resembled that image in his head, so really he just screwed himself over. Long story short on Neal: he's the kind of guy who pushes sex on people who may be, you know, asleep. Charming.

Anyway, you're not supposed to like Neal, and rest assured I didn't. Nora eventually gets up her nerve to divorce him after Ozzie comes back from gallivanting around Canada in attempts to ignore what's going on at the ranch. Ozzie, in comparison to Neal, is a sweetheart. He gets Nora back into the horse boarding business and finds a gray mare that can replace the one Neal randomly shot in the head. The two have a history, but because Nora's father never liked Ozzie their relationship did a nosedive when her father died. I don't necessary buy this logic, but it's suggested Nora dumps Ozzie for Neal after her father (another wonderful piece of trash) kicks it, like she was obligated to finally do what her dad would have wanted, after several years of going to extremes in pissing him off. Actually, yeah, I don't buy that at all.

Then there's Clea having a budding romance with some guy. I skimmed over her for the most part. And Maggie's sections basically involved her musing to herself over how different she is now, going from abused wife to outspoken woman, etc. She nags Nora about divorce until Nora agrees, giving Ozzie the opening he needs. Then there is sex in a stall. Only it's not exactly romance novel sex in that it's glossed over and didn't make me laugh out loud.

In short, it's not In The Presence of Horses. It's slightly depressing, there is a lot of time spent on backstory, yet again we're told how often and intensely men suck, but it's hopeful at the end. I did skim through a lot of it, though. So gripping it most certainly was not. Interesting...it sort of was. A must read? Probably not. You won't miss anything if you keep passing it on the bookshelves.

Last Junior Year before revising your career goals.

Last Junior Year
by Barbara Morgenroth
1978

It's been a while since I've delved into the 1970s, but after reading The Perfect Distance I was inclined to hunt this book down.

Kim wanted to ride, ride really well; well enough to make the U.S. Equestrian Team. But the only thing she had going for her was her horse, Foxy. Her father didn't really approve of her love of horses and refused to spend the money that would give her good teachers and allow her to go to the best shows.

At seventeen, a senior in high school and about to begin her last official year as a junior rider, she was desperate. She needed a big break. And she got it in an unexpected way. An assistant judge at a small show, who liked her and liked her horse even thought the main judge didn't, suggested she call an Emory Reis. Over her parents protests, she did. And suddenly she had a teacher -- a free teacher, who asked only for real dedication to horses and riding. Eventually, because the inner circle of riders form a close group who help each other when the help can go both ways, she not only had lessons but a place to ride and a friend to ride with, to practice jumping with, and eventually to do the winter circuit in Florida with.

But along with really learning to ride, Kim learned almost too much about the politics and economics of riding. Dreams, she found, must sometimes die in order that possible things, and maybe better things, can happen.

Not the best summary, mainly because it reads like a brief book report. Also, that is the book. There's nothing to say now that the summary hasn't already pointed out. Kim is obsessed with trying to get into the U.S. Equestrian Team. She has a number of factors that sort of make this dream impossible to accomplish: she isn't rich, has only one horse, her horse is sort of green, and she sort of isn't that good. She also has parents that are not at all interested in horses, and think she should (gasp!) go to college. So she has her family to contend with on an almost regular basis. The story rambles through Kim's attempts to take the right advice and improve herself through her last junior year before aiming for USET, school and education be damned.

There are many things that I liked about this book, most of them having to do with how freakishly knowledgeable Barbara Morgenroth comes across as being. There's a directness in the dialogue and the characters that I really liked, and Kim isn't a typical horse story character. She's obstinate, but she's not annoying in her determination to realize her dream of riding for USET. In terms of her horse, Foxfire, he's good, actually better than she is, but he isn't a Super Special OMG Amazing Wonder Horse. The secondary characters are all appropriately developed and a little quirky. So that's all good.

What I liked even better (and I'm about to spoil this for you, if the summary didn't do that already) is that the book's whole purpose is to point out that sometimes your dreams are hilariously wrong and you've romanticized your end goal to a point that it will never live up to your expectations. So when you realize this, suck it up and act like an adult. Kim gets invited to try out for USET, but before she can even get to the trials it's made wildly apparent to her that USET isn't where she wants to be. Mainly because they point out to her that there are tons of riders available to them. What they need, unfortunately, is horses. Good horses. Horses like, say, Foxfire. So will Kim kindly shove off, but leave behind her horse, please? Kim doesn't really have to think about that very hard. USET is firmly ruined to her, and she decides to take her career and apply it at the barn of the (formerly mentioned from summary) assistant judge, Jeff (who I was sort of in love with by the end of the book) who wants a rider. So, yes, the whole book is a lesson in getting to your goal and figuring out what to do when you realize your goal is a deep, meaningless void. Fun!

What I didn't like was that, for as much as I liked the book, it felt like it was scratching the surface with the story. You like the characters, but you don't know the characters. Kim likes horses. She's a feminist. She sticks to her principles. That's it. The book isn't very big on description; in fact, it's basically an endless parade of horse scenes or mulling over horse career aspirations, leading us to yet more horse industry facts. It was a barage. Seriously, I wanted this book to back off a little in that department and give me a little plot, which was lacking. There is no closure with Kim's parents, Kim is remarkably unable to think of anything other than horse career goals, and if there was any one horse story character that I desperately wanted to have a hobby, it was this girl. Friends, even. Kim has no hobbies, she has no friends. She has only a dream and determination, which is all classic horse story character, so at the end of the day, she's not that enjoyable to be around. You sort of want to scream at her to go buy a pair of shoes that would never survive one walk through a barn. I mean, it's okay to own clothes that you can't ride in. Seriously. It is. Kim, of course, refuses to accept this basic fact of life.

Ultimately, I classify this as a good book. I liked it, despite some rather tiresome problems that are both expected and, well, smothering. This book nearly burned me out on horses, that's how crazy obsessed Kim is, which would be unfortunate given that I'm going to the barn first thing tomorrow. However, I enjoyed the realism and I enjoyed the ending, and it's really not a special horse and determined girl win everything and are loved by all book. So if you want to take a look at Last Junior Year, head over to your library. This one is out of print, and it looks like buying a copy online will run you over $30. I feel I need to clarify now: this may be a better horse book, but it's not worth $30. It's library worthy, but if you find it for five bucks in a used book shop, go for it.

And this commences my Sweet Valley experience.

First Place
Sweet Valley Twins #8
1987

Some people have all the luck...

Lila Fowler, the snobbiest girl in Sweet Valley Middle School, has gotten her own beautiful horse -- and she doesn't seem to care. Elizabeth Wakefield thinks it's not fair. Elizabeth absolutely adores horses, so much that she'll do all of Thunder's grooming -- just for the chance to ride him every day.

Elizabeth's behavior makes her twin sister Jessica furious. Jessica accuses Elizabeth of trying to steal her best friend away. And that's not all Elizabeth is doing! She's deceiving eveyrone at the stable and is making trouble for her closest friend, Amy. Just how far will Elizabeth go before she loses everything -- all for the love of a horse?

Okay, seriously? Who thinks Elizabeth is about two seconds away from whacking Lila in the head with that crop?

I was never a Sweet Valley fan, but when I read Lucy Takes the Reins earlier this month I knew I'd have to read First Place eventually. Now that I have completed this book, I can call my stint with this series complete and move on with my life.

Lila is the bitch of Sweet Valley, Jessica is mainly her minion, and Elizabeth is a volunteer minion because Lila has a horse, and is using the horse mainly as an attention getter. This whoring out of the horse ruffles Elizabeth's adorable indignant feathers, and she's determined to ignore Lila's attention whoring until she gets roped into seeing the horse and he is the most gorgeous horse ever.

Seeing as how Elizabeth appreciates horses and Lila doesn't, Elizabeth decides to do just about anything to keep in Lila's good graces so she can keep riding the horse. Jessica gets upset that Elizabeth is taking over her minion job, and Elizabeth is mostly disgusted with herself and everyone around her, but keeps doing what she's doing because she loves the horse so much.

Because Elizabeth rides the horse so much, she seems to be under some impression that everyone else at the stable thinks that the horse is hers and not Lila's. As if everyone has suddenly forgotten who the actual owner is because someone else rides the horse. I mean, I guarantee someone is paying the board and those checks don't have Wakefield written on them. Elizabeth, sweetie, stop thinking you're so important. Anyway, this owner's competition is coming up and Elizabeth wants to enter because despite just learning how to ride she's already clearing two foot jumps. Somehow. Like, she was cantering successfully after one lesson, so she must be on some amazing learning curve.

Anyway, at a Unicorns sleep over, Elizabeth spends her time not being thrilled by her invitation and Jessica broods over her sister having been invited. During a bit of gossip involving Elizabeth's friend, Amy, she explodes and tries to make Amy sound cool by divulging Amy's big secret -- Ken kissed Amy! Someone must think Amy is cool besides Elizabeth! Well, that was a mistake. The Unicorns start making kiss sounds at Amy (I find it amusing that a group of teen girls would obsess over boys, but would ridicule another girl over a kiss...I can't decide if this is insane or completely logical, which seems to happen a lot with teen girls). Anyway, Amy freaks out and accidentally discloses Elizabeth's secret about the owner's competition.

You'd think Lila wouldn't care, but she totally does and runs to the stable to insist that Elizabeth can't ride because she's not the owner! Of course, no one cares. Elizabeth convinces Lila that her horse would win, and thrilled with the chance to attention whore again, Lila tries to get Elizabeth to ride. Elizabeth refuses to whore herself out for the sake of gaining Lila more attention, but Ted is sooo thrilled to do that for her. He rides the horse in the advanced show and they win because Jessica shows up and Ted has a crush on Jessica, elevating his game to some super awesome level. Lila sells the horse to Ted, and Elizabeth is at first concerned about this until Ted assures her that she will still be able to ride. Because it's all about Elizabeth, and I guess this horse is so fantastic that lesson horses could never compare.

Random Points:

• "I'm not skinheaded, either." Um, wait. Can we back up for a second?

• Apparently the "greatest race horse of all" is Man-of-War.

• Elizabeth admired the perfect slope of his neck, rising like a tree trunk from his forequarters. This doesn't sound like a comfortable horse to me.
  

• Lila's "spare set of riding clothes" was nothing less than a Stetson, a wool challis shirt with a matching silk bandana, riding pants, a belt with a mother-of-pearl buckle, a buckskin vest, shotgun chaps, and custom-made calfskin boots. Really, do I even need to make a comment on this?
  

• Apparently this local stable has the biggest collection of tack in southern California. Shocking! I had no idea people kept statistics on that...

Next there will be more McLeod's Daughters, and then I'm going to take some time to ponder Running Horse Ridge. Because I know we're all too curious for our own good.

I just read a Sweet Valley book, and I plan to read another one.

Lucy Takes the Reins
Sweet Valley Twins #45

A real champion...
Elizabeth Wakefield's friend Ted Rogers is in big trouble. He's been behind in his payments to Carson Stables for the care of his horse, Thunder. Unless he wins the prize money in a regional jumping championship, he'll have to sell the magnificent animal.

With everything riding on this competition, Elizabeth offers to help Ted train. That's where they meet a mysterious new girl named Lucy Benson. Lucy seems to know a lot about horses. And when Ted takes a bad fall, only weeks before the competition, Elizabeth is convinced that Lucy can take his place. Elizabeth doesn't know that a secret fear has kept Lucy off a horse for the past two years. But she does know that Lucy needs to compete -- and win--for Ted's sake...and her own.

Somehow I managed to get through my entire life without having read a Sweet Valley book. Right up until today, anyway. Naturally I know of the Sweet Valley twins, sort of how Jessica Wakefield knows of horses. This book is a follow up of some sort of A Horse of Her Own plot plus a Sweet Valley twin. The long story short: Ted bought a horse he couldn't afford because some snobby girl failed to be responsible. Pretty basic horse story. Only this time we get to see the fall out of what happens when someone randomly decides to buy a horse they shouldn't have bought in the first place.

Ted is having money issues, and he's got one month to either fall into a life of crime or win a show so he doesn't have to sell his horse, Thunder. Elizabeth decides to drop everything so she can help Ted practice on Thunder at all hours of the day, because she likes the fact that she can ride Thunder also. Occasionally. Not that you see her do this at all. I have to wonder what Elizabeth's purpose is in this book, other than playing the emotional support for every other character. During their conversations in the tack room, or whatever they were doing, they discover someone slipping treats to the horses and find Lucy, random person that Elizabeth totally has to befriend and therefore eventually help. Lucy loves horses and is a "good rider," but she avoids the topic of riding like the plague so you know there's a deep, awful secret buried deep down somewhere. Then you have Ellen, one of Jessica's friends and fellow Unicorn member, who spends her time being completely ridiculous when she attempts to ride, but is somehow considered a logical threat at the show. I fail to see how this is possible, but this happens a lot in these stories, and I guess I'll just continue to be confused about it.

So there's that whole plot. Meanwhile you have Jessica and her friend, Lila (Thunder's previous owner). They happen to take a walk on the beach and the fact that there has been an oil spill manages to fly right over their heads. Like, they make the observations that the ocean is a) black and b) smells like oil well before they decide to climb around on some sludge covered rocks so they can ask someone what this substance is. Jessica finds a seal pup and makes the decision to become interested in helping the environment for the sake of being near the cute boy that is part of the clean up effort. She attempts to get out of this after she realizes that she signed herself up for cleaning sludge, and the boy isn't that cute, but by then she's become emotionally attached to the seal and suddenly makes a conscious effort to drive everyone mad with her lectures about paper napkins.

While that's going on, Lucy is having a moment of rebellion and tells Ted that she will stand in for him at the show when he falls off Thunder and breaks his leg. Ellen is not about to let this happen, because all of a sudden they're showing in the same class (before Ellen was in Junior Hunters and Ted was in Junior Jumpers, but halfway through the book I guess it was decided this wasn't dramatic enough). So Ellen demands that Jessica dig up some dirt on Lucy. Jessica inadvertently does this and finds out that Lucy's parents don't want her to ride. There was some issue. She fell, was diagnosed with epilepsy, her horse was sold, emotional scarring commenced. Seeing as how this is 1991, and apparently no one has an answering machine, Ellen starts to call Lucy's house repeatedly so she can tip her parents off and kick Lucy out of the show by turning Lucy's parents against her. Poor Ellen called all night, but could only get ahold of these people the next morning. So Lucy is in the middle of jumping when her parents show up and, because they're idiots, start shrieking as she's approaching a jump. But Lucy, being super freaking fantastic, still manages a clear round.

Because Jessica apparently has morals, she organizes some tween stupidity during Ellen's jump off. In that the Unicorns start a cheerleader type of display during her round, which causes Ellen's horse to spook. Ellen falls, and then flips out and chases everyone around while screaming and aiming to beat anyone she catches with her riding crop. That is true friendship.

Anyway, Lucy's parents have a breakthrough and let Lucy ride. Lucy naturally wins the show and Ted gets to keep Thunder, although he apparently hasn't thought ahead because who knows how he's going to keep affording board.

What's sort of sad about this is it's not a bad book, as far as horse books for the tween girl market go. I can't believe I just said that, but I guarantee you I've read worse. Like, Wild Thing by Dandi Daley Mackall? I would sooner beat my head against a cement block than waste my time writing a recap of that. Plus, you know, I decided I couldn't finish it well before she started rolling out the Bible verses. It was just that level of awful. Sweet Valley couldn't even aspire to being that bad.

Blood Red Horse: In which I link to Wikipedia a lot.

Blood Red Horse
by K.M. Grant
Book One of the de Granville Trilogy
Published: 2004

So, I liked the movie Kingdom of Heaven. Orlando Bloom is pretty, and there were all of these gorgeous horses and that's pretty much all you need to sell me on something. Plus, had they spun that movie in a slightly different direction it could have very easily become The Black Stallion. Only during the Crusades. How awesome would that have been? So when I come across Blood Red Horse, which is essentially boy and horse go to the Crusades, naturally I'm beyond happy to give this a try.

Two Boys. One girl. The adventure of a lifetime.

You need three things to become a brave and noble knight:

A warhorse.
A fair maiden.
A just cause.

Will has a horse—a small chestnut stallion with a white blaze in his brow. Ellie is a fair maiden, but she’s supposed to marry Will’s older brother, Gavin. And as for the cause, King Richard is calling for a Crusade. The Knights of England must go to the Holy Land to fight. Will and Gavin will go. Blood will be shed. Lives will be taken. But through it all, two things will be constant—Ellie, and a blood-red horse called Hosanna. . . .

Yes, this is Kingdom of Heaven meets The Black Stallion. Only the stallion is red, and they mention this repeatedly. Right down to how the actual color of blood clashes with the stallion's natural red color, which would then bring into question the title of the book...but whatever. The Blood Red Horse takes place between 1185 and 1193, before and during Richard the Lionheart's stint with the Crusades. So the events of Kingdom of Heaven actually very conveniently occur right before the events of this book. But for simplicity's sake, we'll start at the beginning, in 1185, when Will, Gavin and Ellie are all annoying youngsters.

In 1185 everyone is happy. Gavin is sixteen and basically an asshole. William is 12 and pretty much perfect. Ellie is ten and plays the orphaned, absurdly rich, tomboy distant cousin to the two boys. Because Ellie is extremely rich, Thomas de Granville (father of the boys) intends to marry her off to Gavin, increasing the wealth of the already wealthy family. It's right around time for William to get his first war horse. Or Great Horse. Or destrier or whatever these things are called. Apparently these weren't draft types, so I just imagine a fairly big boned horse and leave it at that. Because Gavin has had his war horse for a while, a big bay called Montlouis, Will is eager to get his own big bay so he can be important and stop this being tossed in the water trough business that he brother likes to do occasionally. Catching his dad on a good day, Thomas says he can go down to the stud and pick himself a horse. Will goes with full intentions of getting another Montlouis, but instead he finds the son of his riding mare, a smaller destrier called Hosanna. Sparks, as you can imagine, fly. I guess chestnuts match just as well with twelve-year-old boys as they do with girls, because William's interest immediately turns to Hosanna and before you know it he's leading him back to the castle or whatnot.

Everyone is all "OMG this horse is tiny!" but William is not to be dissuaded. Hosanna is the perfect equine, and soon wins everyone over. He gallops like he's floating, he never tires, he jumps, he shocks and awes, and, more importantly, he makes Montlouis look all unimpressive and stuff. Yes, that's right. UNIMPRESSIVE.

Time drags by. At some point, Gavin randomly has a mental break and needs Hosanna in order to partake in a fox hunt that apparently lasts from one side of England to another. Seriously, I have no idea what came over Gavin here, because it's not explained all that well, but he loses it and tears England up with Hosanna in search of foxes. While he catches his second fox, he's busy flinging it around and screaming his head off while Hosanna literally collapses right next to him. Gavin shows almost no remorse over this because he's "just a horse," while everyone else has a fit because Hosanna is everyone's equine Jesus. Thomas decides to send Gavin "to the north" and Ellie is all disgusted with him, throwing this little dog statue he made at him and telling him to shove it (or something to that effect...it was 1185, after all). You see, Gavin quickly becomes the most interesting character in this book, as he is flawed and horrible for the majority of it. Naturally I began to root pretty hard for him, as William became more and more perfect to a painful point somewhere during the Crusades. So Gavin has fucked up royally and Hosanna is beyond help, so he's sent to live with the monks for a while.

I could get into this, but I won't. Essentially, one of the monks begins to treat the horse and by some divine coincidence Hosanna lives. He's returned to William, having converted a few monks from Christianity and into worshiping at his hooves. Basically. Then everyone goes to the Crusades, and they're happy to go. Everyone is sporting that classic YAY!WAR!OMG! thing before it inevitably turns horribly, horribly wrong. You know it will. It's the Crusades. People didn't go there and die of fevers and turn to cannibalism because it was fun. You'd think people would learn, but no. YAY!WAR!OMG!

So Gavin and Ellie are betrothed, confusing the hell out of poor little William, but he really shouldn't be that worried because I'm convinced that later on Gavin dies and William and Ellie get married and have fantastic children who ride Hosanna's fantastic foals. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Everyone has extremely unsatisfactory farewells, and Ellie is left alone at the castle and all the strapping men and boys ride off for the Crusades with Richard.

Predictably, everything starts to suck pretty hard, pretty soon. The voyage to the Holy Land takes a year, about half of their entourage die, nearly half of their horses die, and when they finally get to Acre their father, predictably, dies. After this event, Gavin and William have a collective hissy fit and decide that OMG! they hate Muslims! Or something like that. It makes little sense considering their father died of fever, and I'm not altogether sure he even saw battle. Well, anyway. They go take over Acre and that killing of 3,000 captives happens because Saladin won't pay the ransom. When this happens we get our second piece of evidence that Hosanna is actually Jesus: he refuses to move forward when all the knights charge the captives and slaughter them mercilessly in the desert. He just won't go. William gets so pissed off that he does his one (and only) act of imperfection: he smacks the horse on the neck with his sword. However, because of the horse, William is saved from the one act that would have tainted his gary stuness. So, honestly, I don't know what to think about all of this.

Meanwhile we have Kamil. Kamil is a poor, male, Muslim version of Will. He works for Saladin, and he's all vengeful because some Christian knight with a birthmark killed his dad. So Kamil is a bloodthirsty jackass. Essentially, he is Gavin and William combined, up until the end of the book, when he's basically a Muslim version of William. (If you are following me right now, I am shocked.) OKAY, so Kamil wants to kill lots of Christians while Saladin is all "it is right and honorable to not be cruel and blah blah blah." Kamil wants blood, and he wants it now. Then he goes and finds his father's killer and kills that guy's son, but "doesn't know why." Come on, really? Kamil was intolerable for a lot of the book, actually.

Anyway, stuff happens. Gavin whores around, and William is all "I am pure! Do not taint me with your sluts!" Basically. Gavin mocks him and whores around some more. Ellie, meanwhile, is learning to read and write, despite the abbot of the community insisting that women are worthless and should not learn anything because that's when society will decline and fall or something to that effect. Except there's some monk/priest or someone who doesn't think so and helps her anyway, resulting in hysterics and general 1100s craziness about inappropriate behavior, priests, and rich girls potentially getting it on in the middle of the forest. No, nothing actually happened in the forest, but Thomas's original helper guy is plotting to take over while everyone is away in the Holy Land, and he'd really like Ellie's money, so he's maneuvering to put himself in Gavin's place. The plan is to make Ellie look like a whore, step in to marry her (because surely Gavin won't, despite her money, which makes it sort of obvious what evil guy is doing, but whatever because everyone is an idiot and believes him, not Ellie, because Ellie has female private parts) and then rule all of the de Granville property. Ellie is not thrilled.

So the Crusades are, like, still going. They continue and continue. Gavin loses an arm, spurring him out of his asshole, whorish ways and into good, brotherly ways. Hosanna is stolen by Kamil, who has some crisis of faith and gets recruited by The Old Man Of The Mountain, whom I guess is a middle ages version of Osama bin Laden. The Old Man wants to kill Saladin, who has figured out this plot way in advance, making Kamil look like a moron. This all eventually comes to a point at Jaffa, during yet another battle, where Saladin has had enough of this and wants to fight Richard "to the death" despite the fact that this is obviously going to go nowhere again. Richard arrives at Jaffa with enough force to take the city back, but no horses, so Saladin is all wonderful and gives him horses. Saladin makes Kamil hand over Hosanna as payback for being an idiot. Then they all fight, and this culminates in Richard riding Hosanna around and accidentally getting the horse shot with an arrow.

Apparently once the king's horse is felled the battle ends? Or something? Or this is the third piece of proof we need concerning Hosanna actually being Jesus. Because Hosanna is shot with an arrow and everything comes to a standstill. We're talking about a giant battlefield, here. Not only does this happen, but Kamil, Richard, Gavin and William all rush up to the horse, throw religion aside and are all OMG! the pretty pony is all injured! I am not kidding. So they work together to try to save the horse, and eventually this includes William suggesting they figure out where Mecca is and pray to Mecca. I am not even kidding. Richard's all to hell with that, and walks off. But they all pray to Mecca for the horse's sake, and then miraculously Hosanna gets up and they usher the horse a full mile back to Jaffa. And then they send some groom to Saladin to ask for supplies to help save Hosanna, and he sends supplies.

So everyone collectively gets over their Muslim/Christian issues to save Hosanna. Hosanna is saved, and everyone has religious breakthroughs, mostly everyone visits Jerusalem on pilgrimage, some plot points are seeded for the sequel with Kamil coming to England, and then everyone goes home to learn that Richard has been captured by Leopold V. And that Richard randomly makes William the Earl of something, which effectively makes him outrank Gavin, the count of their original castle, Hartslove. Ellie greets them all and decides that Gavin really does need her, seeing as he only has one arm, and he's confused because he thinks she really loves William more, but she doesn't appear to be outwardly concerned about this. It ends on a good note, but surely more insanity is likely to happen, what with Ellie's would-be-almost-second betrothed running around trying to usurp power, and seeing as how Richard is in Austria against his will and all. More adventures to come, I'm sure.

• Hosanna is everyone's savior in this book. Not only does everyone care about his health and general well being, they touch his forehead for good luck, and they include him in their random battle and religious mantras. Like: "For God, the King, and Hosanna." It's weird. Really, very weird.
  

• Show, not tell. Seriously, seriously violated here. Most of this book was basically: "And this happened, and this happened, and while this happened, this had happened, and he said something about this, but everyone knew that this would happen if this didn't and this did." Because of this, all the action is glossed over and makes everyone in the book a stereotype. William is the perfect main character who randomly gets everything without trying, Hosanna is the main character's perfect horse. Ellie is the spunky girl they all leave behind, who has to forge onward by herself. Kamil is the burned Inigo Montoya character who learns that vengeance isn't as great as peace. Gavin is the jackass who pays for his sins and is rewarded with Ellie (maybe, I'm still not convinced he's getting a happy ending there). All other horses are not as good as Hosanna (at all). All evil or slightly evil characters are obvious and are always slinking places. It's all remarkably two dimensional. Actually, it's probably the most two dimensional book I've ever read.
  

• Mary Sues. Oh, man. William and Hosanna make Ashleigh and Wonder look like giant flaws in the face of horse related literature by comparison.
  

• Gavin. Gavin was awesome because he was literally the only character who showed any development whatsoever. Kamil...sort of showed development, but not at all in the way Gavin did. So I pick Gavin. I mean, after suffering through how randomly fantastic and, therefore, boring William was all the time, I have to pick Gavin.

This was a good idea for a book. I wanted to like it. Unfortunately, you know, it just wasn't great. It was sort of mediocre. It was too politically correct and shoved too much time (eight years) in 277 pages and no one was fully developed and Hosanna was way too awesome to be real. I think the Black Stallion was more realistic, and that should be saying something. However, I'm going to read the rest of the trilogy. Just because.

Karen, have we really come this far?

Horse of Seven Moons by Karen Taschek (aka Bentley) Published: 2005 I know we're all ridiculously eager to find out what Karen Bentley has been up to since her last Thoroughbred book went to print eleven years ago. I am here to inform you that Karen Bentley is now publishing books on bats and the universe in general. Next year, she's taking on the civil war. No kidding. I don't know what possessed me several weeks ago, but I discovered all of this and even went so far to find a photo of her...which I promptly lost. I was rather flummoxed by this strange bat, universe, civil war fixation, as this seems to be a rapid departure from her bitchy girl takes on the horse industry writing background. Only then I found Horse of Seven Moons and all my worries ceased.

Struggling up the mountainside in a fierce storm, sixteen-year-old Bin-daa-dee-nin tries to survive. The Mescalero Apache has lived off the land in southwestern New Mexico, hunting and raiding since the death of Apache leader Victorio last October 1880.

Just before dawn, under a full moon, Bin-daa-dee-nin finds a black-and-white horse whose intelligence and beauty surpass that of any horse he's ever seen. Bin-daa-dee-nin trains the surefooted pinto to run fast on command so that he can use him to hunt and on raids. But when the army attacks, the horse disappears.

Fourteen-year-old Sarah Chilton has never felt at home on her family's ranch in New Mexico near Cooke's Peak. At least, not the way she did in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where she lived until just four months ago. Then on Valentine's Day, 1881, Sarah finds the horse of her dreams: a gorgeous pinto, wandering near the river under a bright moon. She names him Moon Dancer and teaches him to jump. Just as she's making wonderful progress with Moon Dancer's training, the Apaches raid the ranch, and Bin-daa-dee-nin has his horse back.

Through army battles, Apache raids, and perhaps Moon Dancer's own mysterious desires, the horse changes hands between Sarah and Bin-daa-dee-nin several times. As each puzzles over the training and tricks the other has taught the horse, the boy and girl learn that life requires adaptation and adjustments--and can sometimes bring great joy.

So that's the longest summary in the history of ever, right? Let me see if I can expand a little on this. Bin-daa-dee-nin is super awesome because he is a) Apache b) on the lam and c) has perfect eyesight. He and his random friends/sort of relations are running from U.S. soldiers after some conflict or something or another. One of his friends is hurt, so this book inevitably becomes one long torturous session as we wait for this guy to die. This takes just about forever. Anyway, Bin is hiding out in a cave, wondering just what the hell he's going to do here, and he has a spirit dream or something and presto! A horse appears. And let me tell you, this horse is freaking gorgeous. He is a black and white pinto, and Bin names him Moon That Flies. Okay, so blah blah blah...Bin obsesses over the horse and ponders if he's been trained and blah blah blah. Eventually we break into Bin's story to learn a little about this girl named Sarah Chilton, a fourteen-year-old blond girl fresh from Arkansas, where things were perfect (you know, this just amuses me). She rues the day her family moved to New Mexico, because she wants a horse, which apparently they can't have despite all sorts of space and other completely ridiculous reasons that involve quality of grass? Well, whatever. Sarah wants a horse, Sarah doesn't have a horse, so what does Sarah do? Sarah wakes up in the middle of the night because she thinks livestock is roaming around the house, breaks all her father's rules in order to be responsible and save the livestock, and winds up catching the same pinto, who randomly shows up on her lawn. So Sarah sticks the pinto in the chicken coop, a Cindy move if ever there was one, distressing her sister, who loves chickens (I am not kidding). We get more pondering over if the horse is trainable or not, blah blah blah. Sarah gets dumped, but she's all self-righteous and perfect about it, and invariably Bin shows up and steals the horse away. Sarah is pissed. How dare they? Don't they know that this horse is her property? Oh, the indignant anger. The self-absorbed whining. Where have I seen this all before? Yeah, Bin steals the stupid horse back and I stopped really paying attention. All I know is that Sarah's anger was so great her father joined the army to get this horse back because Sarah's happiness is everything. So they get the horse back and Bin gets shoved on a reservation and Sarah is all happy again. Of course, she realizes that Bin loves the horse also, but to hell with that. She has her horse, and will proceed now to never think of this situation ever again. We then have an epilogue. Lindsay, Sarah's descendant, goes to a gas station. Mike, Bin's descendant, goes to the same gas station. Lindsay pumps gas. Mike gets a soda. They both notice each other and OMG, sparks fly! Across the gas station parking lot...as wild horses suddenly decide to romp by. And because the horses are all inspiring, they both have a revelation that they should know each other from somewhere, although this is completely impossible because they don't know each other from anywhere.

• It is Sarah's birthday when she finds the horse, which she names Moon Dancer. She has always wanted a horse, and when she finds Moon Dancer she immediately thinks exactly the same thing Cindy would think in this situation: If she found the horse, shouldn't that mean she can keep the horse? Sarah, take your 1880's etiquette and apply it to your real life, please.

• Bin's story is supposed to be the interesting, action packed portion of the book, but I found it exceptionally boring. Plus, he's as perfect as Sarah, what with his zoom lens eyesight and his ability to ride a horse bareback at a gallop and kill things with a rifle without really trying.

• The end was exceptionally weird. Lindsay and Mike both have to think back to their great great grand whatevers, Sarah and Bin-daa-dee-nin. We get extremely short discussion on what they did: Sarah had kids and loved her horse, who disappeared after 20 years of service. Bin-daa-dee-nin went to the reservation and apparently also had kids. Blah. Boring.

• Mike's notice of Lindsay made me laugh: Check out those three hot girls in a car, he thought. Nice. Who the hell thinks like that? Not to mention, Lindsay isn't even in the car.

• Just so you know, Moon Dancer is the fastest horse ever and jumps perfectly.

• Phoebe is Cindy's Heather. At one point, Sarah is having Phoebe, her friend, set up jumps for her (like this is fun and rewarding for the friend...nice, Sarah). And Phoebe requests some time to ride the horse. Sarah hesitates, pondering how much experience Phoebe has. Ahh, wonderful. Phoebe gets on the horse, does everything wrong, and Sarah just suffers her incompetence, further making Sarah look like the perfect equestrian saint. Yes, Karen. I noticed what you did there.

So, yeah, I didn't actually get all the way through this. I suppose Karen has grown marginally as a writer since her run as a Thoroughbred author, but she clearly hasn't gotten over her various characterization issues. All her characters are still variations of Cindy, but are we really surprised?

Looking for a riding princess? Look no further!

Flying Changes
by Sara Gruen
Published: 2005

After finishing up Riding Lessons, I got to work on its sequel, Flying Changes.

Twenty years after her competitive riding career died, Annemarie Zimmer worries that her relationship with the man she loves is off course, and fears that daughter Eva's own dreams of Olympic glory will carry her far from home ... and into harm's way.

When the teenage Eva is invited to audition for a world-class trainer, Annemarie realizes that she must give Eva a chance to soar. But when Eva falls in love with a spectacular blue roan Nokota who hasn't let anyone ride him since his arrival at the barn, Annemarie's doubts come crashing back.

It is a time of change at Maple Brook, when fears must be saddled and broken. And one remarkable family must learn how to deal with Flying Changes.

So, the first thing I have to ask myself is if Riding Lessons really needed a sequel. Honestly, I can't help but come to the fact that I really don't think a continuation of the plot was necessary given that Riding Lessons wrapped up well and left little concern (on my part, anyway) for what would happen with the characters after all plot points concluded. It's not that I found the characters in Riding Lessons mediocre and uninteresting...it's just that their story seemed to be done. Annemarie became a part-time instructor at her mother's barn, her relationships seemed solid, she got her horse, she got back on said horse...it was done.

Apparently, it wasn't done. Annemarie is back, and I don't know how to feel about this. Nevertheless, I read the sequel. And I'm here to recap and report my findings. So here we go.

Since Riding Lessons, Annemarie has moved into Jean Claude's old apartment in the barn in an attempt to seem like she's a nearly forty adult who isn't living with her mother. The main house is too small to hold three people, so Eva and her mother are still living there while Annemarie is off doing who knows what in the barn. Immediately I tend to have an issue with this because it seems like Annemarie is shoving off her maternal duties on her mother so she can more easily sneak about with Dan. No wonder this Eva kid is so annoying -- her mother is desperately trying to act like she's 19.

There is also a host of new issues that have cropped up, obviously. Otherwise we wouldn't have a sequel, because all those concluded plot points have to unravel somehow, right? The issues are as follows:

• Annemarie won't let anyone watch her ride Hurrah. She tends to ride him in the early morning, and she always (ALWAYS) rides him bareback. Because nothing can come between her and her horse...like a saddle. Or pants. No, actually, she does wear pants. I just sort of had to wonder about that part. So because she's so super secret about this, people start to think she needs therapy. Annemarie just wants to BE ALONE WITH THE HORSE. Why can't people understand? Here are my thoughts on this. If you make something a big deal, people tend to react by thinking you're eccentric or need therapy. It's just a given. So shut up or explain to them why you like to ride him alone. It's not like this is a big deal. BUT IT SO IS.
  

• Eva wants to compete. Eva also happens to be a freakish, Mary Sue natural at riding. Annemarie, given her past, doesn't want Eva to compete. Not to mention it's ridiculously expensive to compete and so forth. Eva acts out in an annoying teenage manner by dumping her nice, stable boyfriend and getting an obnoxious boyfriend who smokes pot. She gets expelled for smoking pot. Etc.
  

• Annemarie and Dan don't go out anymore. This is so many levels of horrible for poor Annemarie, who wants to go out! Or maybe she wants him around more often because he keeps going to pick up PMU horses from closing down "pee farms." Or maybe she wants to get married. Or maybe she's just a little insane. Or maybe she's just reading into her relationship way too much. Although, actually, it turns out that she just wants to get married. Mainly because she doesn't want to seem like such a failure anymore. Oh, and she loves Dan too and thinks she should have married him instead of Roger. So she wants to make up for her stupid, teenage mistakes. Or something.

Okay, so those are the issues. Getting back to the plot, Dan asks Annemarie to come stay at his place while he's in Canada picking up these mares because another mare at his place is about to foal and he needs someone to watch her. Annemarie doesn't know how to assist a foaling mare, but she agrees anyway. While she's there she gets a call about a horse someone wants to sell to the rescue. The rescue doesn't buy horses (except auctions, I guess), so Annemarie gets pissed off at her situation and agrees to buy this horse. She goes out there and deals with this Eugenie woman, her obviously neglected/abused horse, and winds up stumbling into a domestic dispute between Eugenie and her husband. The cops come. AGAIN. This is the fourth time in a year that Annemarie has been involved with the police. Anyway, she takes the horse/pony thing and takes it back to the rescue. The mare gives birth, although it's a breech birth, but like that stops Annemarie from being clumsily awesome and saving the day.

Mundane things happen. Really, this is like the best example for mundane details taking over a story. Annemarie wakes up to her daughter shouting for her to get dressed, Annemarie brushes her hair, Annemarie complains about being 39, Annemarie takes a bath, Annemarie rummages through refrigerators looking for beer, Annemarie takes up a whole page with trying to open a beer. It's just like that. So, during all of this, Eva gets expelled and Annemarie finally tells her mother about this vague phone call she got before the book started, which she's been thinking about for at least 80 pages, but is just now coming around to telling anyone about. Including the reader. This woman, Nathalie someone, wants Eva to come train with her. As in full time training, working, tutoring on the side so Eva could get some semblance of education...that kind of training. Because Eva has been kicked out of school, going to train with Nathalie is the best option. So they go to Nathalie's farm and Eva tries out and Eva is accepted because Eva is astonishingly amazing after only one year of formal lessons. I'm not even going to get into the dressage she does in her try out. Just know she's unrealistically amazing.

Then Eugenie pops up again. For seemingly no reason. Then she disappears. I don't know.

So Eva goes to Nathalie's farm. Meanwhile, Dan is going to take Annemarie out for her birthday at Annemarie's favorite restaurant. For some reason Annemarie gets it into her head that TODAY is the DAY. He is going to propose. She knows it. So she gets there and for some reason swats away every romantic gesture he tries to make, right down to refusing this desert she loves. Then he gives her earrings and she totally throws a fit and makes a scene and gets the hell out of there. It is OVER. Like, so over there's another scene of punching walls while Annemarie hides in Hurrah's stall, refusing to meet Dan so they can have an adult conversation about why she's a lunatic.

After this she goes out to a competition of Eva's. Roger, the asshole ex-husband, and his new family (because his new wife just had a shiny new baby) are supposed to be there. They fail to show. Red flags should be waving all over the place right about now. Eva goes into emotional turmoil and screws her dressage test to the point where there's no way she could place in the rest of the show. Eva throws more fits, Eva grows more tiresome, Eva falls off in the cross country, Eva has another fit, and finally Nathalie and Annemarie tell her it's over. She's not going to finish the competition. Eva has another fit, insisting that she wants to leave, blah blah blah, Nathalie calls her a spoiled brat, which is probably the biggest understatement in these two books, and demands that she come support her teammates in the show jumping round or she's not welcome back to her farm. For some reason, Annemarie takes Eva home instead. When they get there, Annemarie's mom tells her that Roger & Co. were in an accident. His new wife is dead and Roger is in critical condition and the baby is peachy keen. Mostly. So they have to go to the hospital and while they're there Roger finally dies. Everyone goes into more hysterics. Eva screams and cries, Annemarie cries, the baby cries...at this point I needed them all to shut up, and thankfully they sort of do. Because someone has to take care of this baby.

Annemarie wants the kid, but the kid is so new that Roger hasn't named a guardian in his will. His wife's family is a no go, Roger has no family, and that leaves Eva as the only family the baby technically has. Annemarie calls up Roger's law firm partners and they pull strings within the Minnesota system, and Annemarie gets the kid. But not before the social services woman likens Annemarie to Ted Bundy and Karla Homolka. SERIOUSLY. Like...some federal judge went over social services and this justifies Annemarie being compared to serial killers? I didn't get it when I read it, and it still makes no sense.

Anyway, during all of this, Dan shows up and proposes to Annemarie. Apparently he was always going to propose during the dinner, but Annemarie blew up before he could actually do so. He had the ring baked into one of the deserts. I don't know why he had the earrings also, but clearly he played that wrong. So he still has the ring. It's still encrusted with chocolate. He rinses it off and they do their thing and are engaged. They take the baby home. They do their new parents thing. They all decide to live in the same house at the farm, and will just put on an expansion so they're not sleeping in the living room. Dan and Annemarie get married. Eva gets to go back to Nathalie's place because Annemarie lies about when they hear about Roger's accident. Eva then wins a competition and a $30,000 purse. Then Annemarie gets on Hurrah and rides him around without tack completely and jumps him in front of Dan. The end.

So, yeah, I don't know exactly what the point was here other than an urge to continue with established characters. I get this urge, I really do. I just don't see much of a plot.

• The Eugenie situation with the pony fizzles and completely dies halfway through the book. I fail to see why this was included or necessary to the story besides the fact that it gives us and Annemarie the opportunity to discover that she would take in an abused/orphaned child. This doesn't need to be said.
  

• If Eva is a riding princess mary sue, then her horse is the equine mary sue to end all equine mary sues. The horse in question is a blue roan Nokota named Smokey Joe. He is special because he is full-blooded Nokota, he is only seven, he only lets "special" people ride him, even the most advanced of riders cannot ride him if he doesn't approve them, and despite the little training he's received considering only "special" people can ride him, he is ridiculously talented and can perform one tempi changes or something. And he can jump huge spreads. And he's like every Thoroughbred horse combined. Honestly, you can't get more mary sue than this. If I thought Annemarie's two brindled Hanoverians was special in Riding Lessons, Eva's blue roan Nokota wonder horse makes Harry and Hurrah seem plain.
  

• The one saving grace in this book is that eventually people stop giving Eva all the slack she demands. Eva is annoying as hell, and when Annemarie starts to blatantly tell her to shut up I was cheering for her on the sidelines.

All in all, I didn't like it as much as Riding Lessons. For the obvious reason that I don't think its existence is justified. Annemarie and Eva are barely tolerable, made so only because Annemarie's mother and Dan seem to balance it out. The last few pages I did like, mainly because Sara Gruen went back to making jumping and riding seem interesting, rather than mechanical and dull. Unfortunately I slipped into boredom during some of the cross country and jumping scenes during the novel, so I can't give this book a pass here.

So that's all. If Sara Gruen writes another horse book, I desperately implore her to find a new cast to play with. I think Annemarie has run her course.

This is a horse story on valium.

Riding Lessons
by Sara Gruen
Published: 2004

I will admit that I steered clear of this book for a long time. Basically since it was published. I remember finding it repeatedly in book stores and repeatedly putting it back on the shelf, I suppose mainly because I was convinced it was nothing more than a romance novel masquerading as "serious" fiction, whatever that is.

Earlier this year I read Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen's third novel. It has horses in it (hell, it's about the circus...of course it has horses in it) but not to the extent that I would read it for this blog. I flew through that one in just under a day and loved it, despite what I thought was an unfortunately weird and unrealistic ending. I'd still recommend it, so I started to eye her earlier books with less reluctance. And then Riding Lessons and Flying Changes were requested for the blog, and that just worked out for me. So thank you, whoever it was that requested these books. I finally convinced myself to read them, all thanks to you.

As a world-class equestrienne and Olympic contender, Annemarie Zimmer lived for the thrill of flight atop a strong, graceful animal. Then, at eighteen, a tragic accident destroyed her riding career and Harry, her beloved and distinctively marked horse.

Now, twenty years later, Annemarie is coming home to her dying father’s New Hampshire horse farm. Jobless and abandoned, she is bringing her troubled teenaged daughter to this place of pain and memory, where ghosts of an unresolved youth still haunt the fields and stables—and where hope lives in the eyes of the handsome, gentle veterinarian Annemarie loved as a girl, and in the seductive allure of a trainer with a magic touch.

But everything will change once again with one glimpse of a red-and-white-striped gelding startlingly familiar to the one Annemarie lost in another lifetime. And an obsession is born that could shatter her fragile world…

There you have it, guys. Tragedy, drama, life changes, and a brindled horse. What more do you want? Well? I should mention that this is a debut novel, which seems to be an easy way to explain any insanity, should there be any. Lucky for us there is little insanity that isn't intentional in this book, because as you can imagine with that summary, there will be plenty of hysterics to go through.

Well, anyway. Annemarie is our main character. She's 38, lives in Minneapolis, has a 15-year-old daughter named Eva, works as a technical writer/editor/something like that, and is married to Roger, a lawyer. Looking at her now, you'd never know she was a Grand Prix rider when she was 18, but all of that ended when her horse crumpled during competition and sent both of them head first into the dirt. The horse, a chestnut brindled Hanoverian named Harry, is destroyed and Annemarie only wishes she could have been put down right along with him. Instead she suffers near catastrophic injuries and somehow manages to fully recover. By the time she's walking again, she wants nothing to do with horses and, in order to assure herself that she'll never get on a horse again, she marries Roger at 19 and runs off to Minnesota.

These first few chapters were exceedingly well done, actually. Sara Gruen takes you through the competition with Anniemare and Harry, making show jumping actually seem interesting to me. So this has become my test to see if a book passes muster: if it makes a repetitive motion I've read about countless times feel breathtaking, like I'm reading the same stuff for the first time, the book is worthwhile. Sara Gruen manages this in the first chapter. So I guess I could shut this review down now. But I won't. I have other things to get to, because it's not all sunshine and roses here, guys.

After these initial chapters, we get to Annemarie's life at present. Her 38-year-old self is about ready to take another fall, which happens in the form of 1) getting laid off and 2) her husband telling her that it's over. He has a 23-year-old girl he'd really like to have sex with more than her. This is his plan. No one can sway him from his plan, which is good because Annemarie does the equivalent of a shrug. More or less. She just calls up her mom to tell her she's coming home, but her mom just informs her that her father has ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease. The world has officially ended. Annemarie goes home to face the family she basically ran away from twenty years ago, dragging her petulant teenager along with her.

Because this is in the first person, we get a lot of Annemarie's internal angsting over all of this. She's got issues with everything, from her memories of her father being a drill sergeant forcing her to ride until she found Harry and rode because she loved Harry, to her mother's disapproval over twenty years, to her daughter testing every boundary a teenager can test, to the guy (Dan) she loved more than Roger but left because her parents actually liked him (the horror), to the divorce papers she filed, to her failed marriage...you name it, Annemarie is angsting over it. Essentially.

While she's there, Annemarie decides to take up managing the family's barn. It's a high class barn, filled with high class horses that I'm sure plenty of high class people are riding and paying plenty to keep in high class conditions. They have a French trainer named Jean-Claude, for Christ's sake. Annemarie figures this managing thing shouldn't be very hard, so she takes up the reins and takes the barn for a test drive. We'll see how that turns out a little later.

As it happens, Dan is still around. He's a vet, Annemarie's parents are still in love with him, and he runs a rescue somewhere nearby. Eva starts to volunteer for him, although that's sort of a tenuous situation because Eva is experiencing her raging teenage hormone years right now. Anyway, Dan recently picked up a horse at auction, and it's a chestnut brindled Hanoverian with one eye. Turns out Harry has a full brother, you guys. His name was Highland Hurrah, and Annemarie's parents considered buying him for her had she not run off and gotten married. This horse is now 17, and was also a Grand Prix jumper with someone named Ian. Only he was supposed to have died in a fire. Annemarie is flummoxed. Flummoxed! Or, well, she cries a lot. Same thing. She insists on adopting the brindled horse, and then she becomes obsessed with finding out everything she can about Highland Hurrah. To the point that she insists that Dan get this old scanner that could read any old chip that Hurrah might have had. He does this and calls it in before Annemarie can change her mind, resulting in hysterics because DAMN IT she didn't specifically tell him to call it in and he SHOULD HAVE ANTICIPATED her insane change of mind! How inconsiderate of him!

I should mention that by this point they're sort of casually dating. Yeah...not a good idea to go off on the guy when he's trying to be helpful, Annemarie. Anyway, turns out the brindled horse is actually Highland Hurrah. They punch walls in anger and that's that. Only this is where Annemarie flies off the deep end. She's not a good manager. Like, at all. Instead of managing she's been spending every waking minute surfing the internet looking for pictures of Highland Hurrah so she can compare him to her brindled horse, becoming further convinced her horse is Hurrah, which leads to this wall hitting episode. And it also leads to her accidentally telling off a high class boarder, who hauls her six high class horses out of there, the farm runs out of hay and shavings (nicely done, Annemarie), she has to buy more expensive hay and shavings to make up for her internet obsession, and they run out of money. Literally. All the paychecks bounce. Then she fires one of the stable hands for getting flirty with Eva and for being Mexican, leading to all of his stable hand cousins quitting. She's on a serious roll.

While this is happening, she's also very busy losing it. Because it's been confirmed that the horse is Highland Hurrah she comes up with a plan to dye all of Hurrah's white stripes. She actually does this. Then she's off thinking rapid fire of ways to get the horse off the farm, and before she can really do this her dad dies. Only he doesn't just die. Oh no. Her parents have been cruising around to different doctors, gathering up all this phenobarbital something or another so they can give him one massive dose...taking him 18 hours to die. While Annemarie has been off acting like a loon, her father has been slowly committing assisted suicide. How's that for closure, Annemarie?

The police come. Everyone gives their statements, and then they discover that Eva has run away. The police come again. Eva turns up in Minneapolis because at this point she'd rather be with Roger, and seeing as how Annemarie has very quickly lost it, I don't blame her. Because I guess that Minnesota requires a court hearing to get divorced, Annemarie has to go back there anyway to get officially divorced, and she's supposedly going to pick her up then. She goes to Minnesota, gets divorced, gets drunk, and Roger tells her he always loved her more. That asshole. Eva still won't come home with her, so she drives back and has a series of epiphanies about her life and so forth. Essentially, she stops being so insane.

Although this is short lived because when she gets home there's a trailer by the barn. Horse thieves are after Hurrah, of course, because this Ian guy is a prat. Annemarie calls 911 and then she and Jean-Claude more or less save the day by kicking ass and taking names. The police come again. For a while Annemarie is suspected of...doing something illegal, but not that anyone really comes to any conclusions there. The police cart Hurrah off to New Mexico, where the trial for Ian will be held, Eva comes home to see the funeral, she inexplicably stays, Jean-Claude decides to leave, but not before almost having sex with Annemarie in a stall for no reason that she initiates and stops, Anniemarie and her mother, who will not be going to jail, I guess, decide to collectively get over it, and then Annemarie and Dan have sex. Yay!

So things finally settle down. Annemarie sells her house in Minneapolis, using the extra money to pay for the damage her irresponsibility wrought on the barn. She becomes the barn's instructor, doing a much better job at that than at management. Eva adopts a filly from Dan's rescue, I guess is still seeing the stable hand boy because he's got a scholarship (therefore he can date her, despite being Mexican or something), and Dan goes out to New Mexico and brings back Hurrah from yet another auction. It ends well. Annemarie finally rides Hurrah, getting over twenty years of trauma and overblown angst.

• I expected more to be said between Annemarie and her father. Instead she spends most of the book dodging him, and then he commits suicide, so I'm not sure how to feel about this. After he's dead, she sort of gets some things off her chest to her mother, but it's not the same, especially considering she harbors such resentment toward being forced to ride.

• The potential Jean-Claude/Annemarie sex. Comes out of nowhere, really has no purpose, and left me pretty damn confused.

• Hurrah's transformation. Hurrah is initially a very damaged horse, with probably some severe psychological trauma. Annemarie's method of getting through to him is just sticking him in a pasture by himself and rolling apples toward him for weeks on end. Right when she's starting to lose it after neglecting to order hay and realizing the barn could possibly be foreclosed on, Hurrah does a 180. Conveniently enough. After that, he's basically a kitten.

• The whole Hurrah plot. Ian Whatshisname set up an accident to make it look like Hurrah had died so he could claim over a million dollars in insurance. Dan mentions it's impossible for this horse to be Hurrah because any insurance agency would have to see the body for a claim to be valid. Instead of killing Hurrah, Ian kills another horse and has its body burned beyond recognition in order to get the claim. So...why not just kill Hurrah? What is the point in keeping him alive, other than it can come back to bite him on the ass? Here, I guess we can explain this off as a debut mistake, but it's a pretty major one. Anyone with enough gall to try to defraud an insurance agency should have enough gall to actually kill the horse in question.

• Annemarie...is not exactly likable. I started off the book liking her, but by the point where she was panicking because she hadn't ordered hay and bedding for weeks on end she started losing massive amounts of points with me. Not to mention I'm not sure how feasible it is to blame surfing the internet because you're obsessed with finding pictures of your horse. And this is how it goes for most of the rest of the book. She wants things and freaks out after she gets them. She mainly overreacts to everything, seems to really actually be racist (I can't explain her freak out when she tries to get her stable hands to come back, resulting in her peeling out of a predominantly Mexican neighborhood because Mexican men are walking up to her car), shirks off responsibility...she's a mess. I think she manages to pull herself back together at the end of the book. Well enough that I started to like her again, but by three quarters through you sort of wish someone would knock her unconscious and take over the story for her.

So, yeah, it's got some problems. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to think of the sequel, especially given the fact that Annemarie is back as the main character in Flying Changes. It's next on my list, so I'll see how it goes. Otherwise, I still recommend Riding Lessons. It's better than I thought it would be, but it's definitely not in the same league as Water For Elephants. I guess that means Sara Gruen is growing as a writer. Good on you, Sara.