The Outside of a Horse

The Outside of a Horse
by Ginny Rorby
2010

Hannah Gale starts volunteering at a horse stable because she needs a place to escape. Her father has returned from the Iraq war as an amputee with posttraumatic stress disorder, and his nightmares rock the household. At the stable, Hannah comes to love Jack, Super Dee, and Indy; helps bring a rescued mare back from the brink; and witnesses the birth of the filly who steals her heart. Hannah learns more than she ever imagined about horse training, abuse, and rescues, as well as her own capacity for hope. Physical therapy with horses could be the answer to her father's prayers, if only she can get him to try.

I wound up really liking this book. Allow me to explain. 

Dream of Night

Dream of Night
by Heather Henson
2010
Reading Level: Ages 9-12

Untamable.  Damaged.  Angry.

Once full of promise and life, now lost in the shadows of abuse.  This is Dream of Night's story--and it is also Shiloh's.  One is a Thoroughbred racehorse, the other a twelve-year-old foster child.  By chance they both find themselves under the care of Jessalyn DiLima--a final stop for each before the state takes more drastic measures.  If this doesn't work out, the girl will be sent to a "residential facility" and the horse to a vet...for euthanizing.

This is their last chance, so why are they both so resistant?  And why can't they see that Jess's life is not as easy as it seems?  She fosters animals and children like them for a reason--she's a little broken too.  And, like Shiloh and Dream of Night, Jess knows what it means to have lost nearly everything you love.

So, I haven't read a horse book since May?  Is that even possible?  Apparently so.  Also seemingly impossible, I have decided to delve back into my black hole of horse books by starting with the most abusetastic of the bunch.

Dream of Night is told from three perspectives.  Shiloh, the girl who never came from the best background and wound up getting beaten repeatedly and burned by her mother's boyfriend; Dream of Night, who was a promising racehorse and/or a champion who was plagued with injury before falling off the face of the earth to end up in one of those wildly insane abusive situations; and Jess, who takes them both in and attempts to rehabilitate them.

For most of the book, both Shiloh and Dream of Night make some truly impressive attempts to not be helped.  Shiloh's over there writing every curse word she knows on the walls of her closet and ripping Misty of Chincoteague to shreds because it's Jess's favorite book.  Night spends all of his time screaming and ripping the blankets Jess has the audacity to put on his hairless body.  It's...kind of annoying.  I can't decide if this is my experience with horse abuse plots, or because I am the impatient sort.  Night didn't bother me as much as Shiloh, as her path toward great enlightenment takes longer while she's being destructive and blindly, belligerently ignorant (which is totally her prerogative, being twelve and all).  Jess does come off as even more saintlike for weathering Shiloh's nonstop storm, which is mostly extremely intense even while Shiloh makes some tiny strides toward caring about anything (i.e. Night) outside of how screwed up her immensely screwed up childhood obviously is.  Night, predictably, only starts to take some strides toward not being angry at the world when equally angry and messed up Shiloh approaches him out of...I will assume this is a kindred spirits sort of thing?

The book is framed by phone calls.  Shiloh's mom doesn't help matters when she keeps finding the phone number for whatever foster family has taken her in, so she can totally confuse Shiloh on the fact that she's not ever going to be a capable mother.  And Night's previous owner keeps calling randomly and hanging up, presumably waiting for someone to get on the line and tell him the address of the number he keeps calling.  How he got the number and not the address is anyone's guess, but essentially he wants Night back...so he can randomly attack him with chains some more.  Great way to convince the courts that you're a responsible horse owner!  Sure, it makes no sense, but then no one ever said that abusive situations are ever logical.

The book cheats a little bit and skips forward a year, giving us moderately stable Shiloh and moderately healed Night, because to not see them a little bit progressed past the state in which they spent the vast majority of the book would be too much for pretty much anyone to handle.  

- The book is mostly made up of fragments and italics.  Horses whinny like this: Rrrhhhraaaa!  Which I found kind of hilarious, especially when Night and his former owner have an altercation that was written as Rrrhhraaaa!  "Aaaaaaaahhh!"  Rrrhhhraaaaa!  "Aaaaaaaahhh!"  Rrhhhraaaaa!

- Yes, I'm easily amused.

Heartland: More moral lessons and some bile for me...

Every New Day
Heartland #9
by Lauren Brooke

Firstly, I actually fucking hate this series. I would say it's the worst horse series ever created, but sadly Chestnut Hill takes that title going away.

So in this book, Every New Day, our dear Amy Fleming is a busy girl. She's grappling with a relationship with Ty, the stable boy. Who dropped out of school to become a Super Horse Helper. There's a winner for you, right there! People in this book actually have the audacity to say that Amy and Ty are perfect for each other. Yeah... I'd take that one as an insult, Amy.

Anyway, Amy is all shy about telling people 'cause she thinks this will place pressure on her. Besides, she's all determined to go to this Okanumba place that's run by this Native American horse whisperer, Huten. Apparently, her mother made a promise that she would go back there one day. And that didn't happen... cause... well... you know. Bad stuff happened.

Amy starts working with Mercury, the featured troubled equine of this book. Mercury is owned by two guys and I just get the impression that they're gay. Two guys who ride? Who joint own a horse? Pardon me for stereotyping here, but years of reading these type of books have ingrained that tendency into me.

Back to Mercury. Ok, so this horse is a showstopper. But he's been badly treated in the past (big shocker there) and had his legs rapped to make him jump higher. Amy tries to fix him, and she and Ty disagree over some crap. Things don't go well. Mercury takes off with Amy, freaks out when he's even near fences.

Amy gets a brainwave! Maybe Huten can help! Then she can fulfill her mother's promise too! Yay! It doesn't take much to convince her grampa and big sister, Lou. Ty gets all sulky because his opinion doesn't matter. Boo-hoo.

So, she ends up going there for a week. Skipping school and everything. But we all know school isn't a big deal in horse books, so moving along here.

Huten is all blase and shit. How dare he ignore her needs! He makes Amy just sit in the paddock with Mercury! And goes for a walk ON FOOT to some tourist village where people are weaving baskets... is it the reed or the basket that the people are thinking about? This is the powerful question he poses Amy. She's all like 'duh... the basket!' and Huten is 'yeah... no. Wrong answer.'

Then Amy goes for a hack with Mercury and gets lost and then Mercury finds the way back and she's freaked that no one cares...

Only, it turns out it's all been part of her training. She has to let Mercury just decide things for himself! Wow!

After that revelation, Amy is able to jump Mercury. And then she makes up with Ty, who concedes that she was right all along.

Tear.

You know, I find it bloody hard to believe that a horse can be fixed just like that. I have been working with an Arab mare now for two weeks just doing ground work. Yes, I admit that I am trying out Parelli. And that it's surprisingly getting results. However, fixing broken horses takes time! I haven't even attempted to get on Shakeelah yet! Heartland, you are messing up the perceptions of young readers worldwide that natural horsemanship is a quick fix! It's not. Parelli himself states that it is a lengthy process. And I don't buy the Monty Roberts way of doing stuff, either. I'm just saying...

Totally Horse Mad, and possibly certifiably crazy.

Totally Horse Mad
#1: Totally Horse Mad
by Kathy Helidoniotis
Published: 2003 (AUS), 2008 (USA)

I had a great idea. Maybe I could buy Princess. Then she'd really be mine, not just a horse I rode once a week ... I made up my mind. If it was the last thing I did, I was going to get my very own horse.

The only things that stand between Ashleigh Miller and the horse of her dreams are a whole lot of dollars that she doesn't have, parents who don't know one end of a horse from another and a city backyard the size of a shoebox.

Ashleigh can't believe it when her parents announce that she will really have a horse of her own, but at a price she could never have imagined. She will have to say goodbye to her best friend, Jenna, South Beach Stables and her favourite horse, Princess. Ashleigh and her family are leaving the city and heading for Shady Creek, a small country town. And that's where the adventures in this Horse Mad series really begin.

I have to say this first and foremost: if I hadn't seriously started skimming (like, picked up one sentence every ten pages) at page 165 in this 229 page book, Totally Horse Mad would have broken me. If I had gone on reading past the point of no return, right now I'd be huddled in a corner, sobbing and swearing off horse books for the rest of my life.

Now that I've blurted that out, let's discuss the book. Totally Horse Mad is an Australian series recently transported to us Americans. It's not Americanized in any way, and to help us understand you cute Australians, we're given a helpful glossary of Australian slang in the back of the book. Because I guess you guys have a lot to say about chooks and mozzies and such things. However, what sort of amuses me is the inclusion of words such as beanie, gymkhana, heaps and nag. It's not like this is a glossary for the stupid (or ignorant, or young, or American). It's definitely termed as a glossary of Australian slang. People, since when are gymkhanas specific to Australia? Granted, okay, American English sort of absorbs everything, but I am damn sure nag and beanie and heaps do not belong on this list.

So we've got another Ashleigh. She lives in a city somewhere, being all busy with her special Australian gymkhanas, apparently. Eventually Ashleigh takes it into her head to raise funds for her own horse, but because she is eleven she cannot legally work anywhere and is left with only one option: irritate the crap out of everyone and pester them to give her a few bucks for jobs she should be forced to do for free. At one point she tries to get a few bucks out of her teacher in exchange for cleaning off his white board. Seriously, if anyone had ever tried that with any of my long suffering teachers, they would have gotten their ass handed to them. Anyway, she and her best friend, Jenna, decide that their best option to raise cash is to hold a garage sale. Being a self-absorbed horse story main character, Ashleigh doesn't bother to sell her things. God no! She's going to sell keepsakes and things like autographed pictures of Mick Jagger...things owned by her parents, of course. When her parents get home, they appropriately have a fit. Ashleigh doesn't get what their problem is. She's just trying to spring clean. They should be thankful! Well, whatever. Things aren't working out very swiftly in her attempts to get a horse, so her parents have decided to step in and shove the plot forward by announcing they're moving to the country, and because of this she can have her damn horse.

Ashleigh is a little upset about this moving thing until she hears about the horse, and then she's so thrilled that when she announces this to Jenna and gets a completely stunned and hurt reaction she is totally confused. She would be, because she is that self-absorbed. But, she's getting a horse! Everything is right with the world! Jenna storms off and Ashleigh moves off to the country, where she immediately comes across this special riding club. She attempts to impress them by saying she's the "Under 12 Champion" back at the city, and in response the kids stick her on a horse they know will throw her. And then they mock her. I was so rooting for them.

Ashleigh slinks home and nurses her bruised mega ego. How best to heal such an ego? Horse shopping! The following is supposed to be comical: three horses are visited, all three are totally wrong. One is a Shetland. One is ancient. One is plain mean. Does Ashleigh want all of them? Yup. Does she get any of them? Nope. Does she whine about this? Oh, man. Great, comedy. I get it, I really do. I also get that she's excited about a horse, but it makes no sense because after this she looks online and is picky about which ads she should take seriously, totally contradicting her insane/eager previous behavior.

But then she randomly decides to buy a horse, sight unseen, off the internet and the horse arrives at their house to the complete surprise of her parents. Ashleigh again plays stupid. But she took care of it! She's responsible! Never mind that she can't pay for the horse in full, or anything. Her parents put their foot down and send the horse packing. What's more, they inform her that they're unable to finance a horse at this moment, what with real life pressures like a mortgage and job shortages and moving expenses, effectively ruining Ashleigh's life. OMG, she hates it here! Her parents suck! Her family sucks! They are liars and meanies and life is not fair. You know what, Ashleigh? Good for you. You've discovered the number one way to get a horse: freak out and blame everyone for everything.

So what happens? A horse! Of course there's a horse. On a trail ride with her local friend, Becky, they stumble across this neglected chestnut mare. Ashleigh falls in love immediately, but the vet has to warn everyone that the mare might not make it. They might -- horrors -- have to put the mare down. Cue crazy shrieking from Ashleigh. No! Absolutely not! What's Ashleigh going to do in order to make sure the mare isn't put down? She offers up the little stable on her property, totally sure her parents will let her have the horse, despite their earlier talk about how they can't afford a horse quite yet. And naturally everyone goes for this idea, the vet because she's apparently an idiot and her parents because they're clearly afraid their daughter might kill herself if they say no.

Who gives an eleven-year-old kid a starved horse? I was totally shocked by this development. What's even better, the horse does worse in Ashleigh's care and Ashleigh, scared that the vet will put the horse down if she says anything to anyone, says nothing. I don't even know what to say about this whole development anymore. I think we can all imagine appropriately enough. It was awful. For the first time in my history of reading horse books, the main character, due to being a total idiot, neglects an already neglected horse. I am not kidding. It was that awful.

But this is all explained away because the horse hasn't been dewormed properly, or something. Yeah, right. Whatever. Finally the vet comes back and drenches the mare, and a few weeks later she's doing swimmingly. Ashleigh names her Honey (Totally original for a chestnut! Just like it's so original to name a palomino Sunshine, or a black horse Midnight.) The vet gives her Honey's owner's contact information and tells her that the mare's real name is Argonaut. The hell? Honey is such a better name! I mean, Argonaut is like being called Sweet Missy Hee Haw or something completely awful. (As you can probably tell, this is where I started to lose it.)

Ashleigh calls the owner, who is awesome because he's all "Screw you, kid. Take the horse and never call me again." Sweet joy! Ashleigh has her horse! Blah blah blah. After this we can all focus on Ashleigh teaming up with Honey and focusing on kicking some major antagonist ass. I think they come in third or something. But rest assured those evil antagonists got theirs. Maybe. I don't know, and I don't care to know.

• When Ashleigh is looking at the horse classifieds online, she types in "horses for sale" in some search engine and gets over a thousand hits. Then she types in "Australian horses for sale" and gets only 27. I just found that humorous. Mainly because I'm a librarian.

I have the second book in this series, but I don't know if I can convince myself to read it. So I guess I'm going to get rid of it. Which brings me to the other part of this post: book giveaway! You can be the lucky recipient of two free horse books: Totally Horse Mad and Horse Mad Summer (in which Jenna comes back and proves she's worth Ashleigh's attention by taking riding lessons). If you want to throw your name into consideration for these, just say so in the comments. I'll give this until the end of the month, and then I'll do some random draw or something. Winner to be announced on March 1!

Running Horse Ridge: In which I discover what being on the fence feels like.

Sapphire: New Horizons
Running Horse Ridge #1
by Heather Brooks
2009

So, yeah. The Super Bowl. While I'm fairly sure that most of my city is falling down drunk and committing some ill advised arson right now, I'd like to take a time out to say how awesome Pittsburgh is. Not Brad Townsend level of awesome, but pretty awesome.

Okay, to the book.

Home is where your horse is

Emily Summers does not want to go to Oregon. Why would she want to leave her friends and Rhapsody, her perfect dressage horse, to move to a horse rescue ranch all the way across the country?

Then Emily discovers that at Running Horse Ridge, she'll be living her dream of riding and caring for horses 24/7, and after she meets the roguish black stallion named Sapphire, she feels she's found a true friend. There's just one catch: Sapphire is at Running Horse Ridge to be retrained and sold. Has Emily met the horse of her dreams only to lose him?

I finished this book a while ago by now, because since then I've spent restless hours thinking about it. I thought about it through the night, through work, through the freaking Super Bowl, and all of this made me angry. This book has hijacked a lot of my time, and I really didn't see that coming. I mean, look at it. Look at that cover. I hate the cover, okay? Who in their right mind expects a book to be good when they're met with this cover? It's got a nice, pretty banner and absolutely no substance. In fact, the photo of that horse comes very close to offending me because it smacks of laziness. Someone went to the trouble of creating that banner, which I think is great, and then...that photo. That photo.

Okay, let's do this. Emily and her dad are driving to Oregon because his father recently died and they need to be at the funeral. Emily never met her grandfather, so she's spending her time dwelling on the fact that this horse she rides back in New Jersey (Rhapsody, who is sublime and refuses to drink from his water bucket if it is not absolutely pristine) is very probably going to be ridden in an upcoming competition by the probably blond female antagonist. So Emily is battling with her raging jealousy about this, bemoaning this stupid funeral for a man she never met.

Then this horse jumps out into the road and he looks exactly like Rhapsody, conveniently enough. That's all it takes, and instantly Emily is in love. Her cousin shows up and carts the horse, Sapphire, back to Running Horse Ridge, which Emily only now seems to start registering as a stable. So they get there and Emily immediately runs off to the stable to bond with Sapphire. The next day, Emily's aunt Debby gives her a riding lesson. Her very first jumping lesson, actually, because Emily is a dressage freak. I know. Color me shocked. Emily is determined to eventually ride Sapphire over jumps, but Debby refuses to let her ride him yet because she's saving him to sell and he's not done training...all perfectly logical. Then Emily accidentally lets Sapphire out of his stall and he runs off again before the funeral.

Everyone panics, but the horse is found and all is okay. Until Emily goes back to the stable early and decides to ride Sapphire without anyone's permission while they're still at the funeral. As you can imagine, Sapphire goes nuts out in the field and dumps Emily, who sprains her ankle and has to wait to be saved by Debby and her dad. They find her, and Debby's husband, Rick, carries her back...but during all of this they find an abused horse off in the woods.

This horse happens to be from a stable that I guess no one ever knew about. Emily discovers the place with her dad, who goes completely insane on the owner of the stable, attacks him, and then locks him in a stall. Then they call Debby et al, who arrive and completely panic. Like...there is running and screaming and...you'd think that there was some maniac shooting a gun indiscriminately at passers by, that's how completely crazy everyone was acting. The cops eventually let them take the horses after the abusive owner attempts to attack one of the cops, and so all forty animals go to Running Horse Ridge.

Despite all of this activity, Debby has not forgotten about Emily's shenanigans with Sapphire. She asks Emily about it and Emily insists that her accident was a one time thing, blah blah blah, and Debby basically emotionally bitch slaps her and says, "I'm sorry you feel that way." Then she bans her from seeing Sapphire. Emily feels the pain of injustice! But she just wanted to ride him in the open without supervision after only knowing the horse for a day, and she only sort of accidentally injured herself and the horse, and she only wants to own him and Rhapsody, and if she can't have him there's no way Debby can sell him to someone else...oh my God, I wanted someone to stop beating around the bush and tell his kid to shove it. She is a VISITOR. For all she knows, she's out of there after the weekend is up. Who the hell is she to walk in there and start bitching about her relatives selling a horse that is theirs to sell, especially when she's never met any of these people and she is going back to NEW JERSEY. Never did anyone say they were staying there for a long period of time. Never. It just completely astonished me, actually.

So more bitching and whining happens about Sapphire, and Debby bitches at Emily some more. Emily tries desperately to prove how responsible she is by taking care of the abused horses, and Debby seems to not care that Emily is working so hard. Then Emily's dad announces that he's bought all forty of the horses (because somehow this will help the stable? I don't get this, because it's not like the stable owns the horses.) All of them except Sapphire! Emily is frustrated some more, Debby doesn't care some more, and then this abused mare gives birth, which somehow means Emily has to ride Sapphire, breaking all of Debby's rules for the sake of the mare. Debby tells Emily that her dad is giving the foal to Emily (of course!) and Emily somehow proves that she is not a whiny brat and Debby decides that she won't sell Sapphire yet, just as Emily's dad decides very conveniently to stay at the stable a little longer to help get the place out of financial distress (because it is, of course...that goes without saying.)

• Emily likes dressage. Again, this completely amazed me. Also, it's apparent that whoever wrote this (as I'm still not convinced that Heather Brooks is real...her little author blurb in this book is way too "she loves to write and rescue horses on the weekends!" to be real) knows what they're talking about. I actually followed what Emily was doing when she was riding this horse in her first lesson with Debby. I comprehended. I was amazed that I comprehended. I sort of grudgingly liked this book for being comprehensible in this area.
  

• The little details in this book are pretty awesome. Right before Emily's dad throws a fit and attacks the abusive owner guy, we learn that the guy is eating a red Popsicle. Right here I was even further incensed because I could just see all of this happening. The red Popsicle made me like this book.

• But seriously, I don't want to like this book. Actually, I don't like this book at all at many, many points. Most of this hinges on Emily. She is a self-absorbed, irresponsible whiner. At one point, she seriously hopes that her father will buy both Sapphire and Rhapsody, and while that's a logical hope for a thirteen-year-old, it's also not a realistic hope, and any thirteen-year-old will own up to that without being pushed. Emily doesn't exactly admit that to herself.

• Plus, she DOESN'T LIVE THERE. She's known all of these people for a grand total of a few days. And she's throwing fits over a damn horse she has no slight right to throw a fit over.

• But still. Like...this book took time to discuss Emily's relationship with her father, her confusion over never having had a cohesive family that did family type things. It captures her complete failure to adjust to her relatives. It was weirdly good in parts. It went far beyond my expectations in several areas, which made its illogical parts so much more irritating.
  

My general consensus here is that I liked it and I really didn't at the same time. I am not happy about this, because I didn't want to read the rest of the books in this series. Now I'm afraid I'll have to.

Heartland: If Wildfire and Caitlin's Way had an illicit love affair in Canada...

Heartland
1.1 Coming Home

So I'm going to start watching this show. On Youtube, I guess, because Canadian television is all, I don't know, caring about who watches their programming for some reason. Look, Canada, I get that this is a Canadian show and all, but if and when you feel like publishing a tween book series about horses set in your own country, feel free to hoard the resulting tv show for Canadian eyes only.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on Canada. Or maybe it's just that I'm royally pissed off that this series gets a whole FREAKING TV SHOW and Thoroughbred didn't. Granted, Wildfire is basically a Thoroughbred fanfic, but that doesn't exactly count, now does it? So, I guess ultimately these entries will become giant rants about the unfairness of life and television. Hear me people that make these decisions: Thoroughbred tv show. You know you want to.

Okay, back to Heartland. I haven't read the books. I figure that I don't need to, given that Monique has laid down a solid primer and I really don't care. Let us watch the opening credits, because that's usually a good indicator of if a show is actually viewable.



So, damn it, I like the opening credits. They're actually way better than the opening sequence, which involves Amy and her mom stealing a horse from someone who is presumably abusing it, because they are morally superior to all other humans in the western half of the United States. Or Canada. Unfortunately for them the guy comes along and immediately shows some rage about the fact that this mother/daughter team has come along and decided that, you know, they'd really like his horse on grounds of their deciding he's an asshole. He rushes in and flips out entirely, deciding that the only appropriate response to this is to beat the horse more. Amy and her mom are shocked by his behavior, and the horse knocks him down. They tell him that they could call the cops, but they'll just take his horse and let him sit there on his ass and think about what a jerk he is, or something to that effect. They load up the horse and go, only to run off the road and into a tree.

There you have it. Horse and Amy survive, but mother dearest kicks the bucket. Amy's sister, Lou, is in a city that does not at all look like New York, and gets a phone call about the accident. She rushes home to be the pillar of strength that Amy can beat on angrily later, when she's feeling bitter and downcast about everything that life has thrown at her. When Amy gets home, looking pale but otherwise totally okay (her face was, you know, shoved into a windshield, so you'd think there would be some stitches, if not some serious bruising), she wanders around in a daze while the horse, a big black animal named Spartan, may or may not survive because he has been traumatized and the vet wants to put him down because of the trauma, I guess. It was one of those moments when a vet wants to put a horse down in a tv show, but has no realistic reason to, so they don't bother to state even a probable, yet fictitious, reason. I found this fascinating.

So Amy's grandpa says to keep the horse alive, and Amy continues to wander around and IM people as she holes herself up in her room. Lou learns that the bank is defaulting on their mortgage, and she goes to meet Steve, the crazy obvious Canadian banker, who so wants to go out with her that he does the natural thing and asks her out on a date if he can get the bank to approve whatever it is Lou is selling. Lou accepts.

Meanwhile, Ty has arrived, you guys, and according to Amy's friend Jen, he is hot. In a juvenile delinquent way. Because Amy's mom is an astonishing judge of character, she just happened to hire this guy before she died. I assume this will be explained later, because he has no experience, or clue. At all. Grandpa Fletcher tells him to stay the hell away from his daughters and then puts him to work.

Lou and Amy snip at each other in classic fashion, and Amy is forced to go back to school, where she suffers the advances of her boyfriend, Jesse, and the Classic Blond Antagonist Girl whose name I can't remember. Eventually they all go to a pool party, and this is where the plot probably deviates sharply from the book because there is underage drinking (from an American standpoint, anyway) and these kids couldn't possibly be older than 16. They can drive, so I guess I'll settle on that age. I could not tell what they were drinking, but I like to think they were drinking wine coolers. Just because.

So Jesse gets drunk and starts saying stupid stuff such as: "I drive really good when I'm drunk!" Oh, Jesse, you are so going to get beaten up. And he does, when Ty comes along and goes all Matt Ritter on Jesse's scrawny, drunk ass. At this point...right here...I wanted a Junior Davis to stand by looking bored by the stupid teenage shanigans, and there was no Junior Davis and I was UPSET about this. This show would benefit from the awesomeness of a Brad Townsend character, but that goes without saying.

Ty beats up Jesse and Amy has had enough of this stupidity, so she decides to walk home. Considering this is the middle of nowhere America, this is probably not wise because it's got to be a long walk. Ty finds her and apologizes and gives her a ride back, where they discover the rest of the farm hands doing Ty's work for him. Ty does not appreciate being found out like this, and when Grandpa fires him he has a melt down and Amy storms off after shouting at everyone and wow, teen angst. It is not as good as Wildfire. It's like a Thoroughbred book populated by drunk teenagers, actually. Hum. I would so watch that.

Yeah, well, during all of this Amy has discovered her gift of horse whispering and has whispered Spartan into being sane. In, like, a day. Go Amy. Lou finds out that the bank won't approve whatever she asked for unless she stays to implement her plan, so she has to stay at the ranch. Ty gets to stay because Grandpa Fletcher decides to be nice, I guess. And then Amy rides around on Spartan some more.

The Good:
This is a gorgeous show. Seriously, some of the scenery here is breathtaking. It reminds me a little of Wildfire in this aspect, because there were some scenes in that show's first season that really hit me as beautiful.

The Not So Good:
It's a general horse story. The formula is there, right down to the retraining a horse in a day thing. At least, it felt like a day. The way the shots were set up made it feel remarkably easy, when the dialogue kept trying to convince you that it wasn't.

The Appreciated, yet Hilarious:
The drinking. Okay, that wasn't expected because I had pegged this show to be majorly G rated, to the point of sugar shock. Yet all of a sudden there is this party scene where girls are running around in either bras or bikinis and everyone has red cups. The best part of this scene: when Ty threw his fists around. Not for the throwing of fists, but for the Classic Blond Antagonist Girl's gumption to actually tell him point blank that his hero routine blew up in his face. Nice work, show. Usually, no one bothers to point this out so directly. Ever.

Next up is After the Storm. I guess the first season borrows most of the book titles, but as you can see from IMDB, this stops rather obviously in season two with titles like "Divorce Horse" and "Showdown!" What, we couldn't think of some nice romantic titles? This is remarkably expected.

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.

TB #24: The Horse of Her Dreams...is ugly. Let's just face facts.

The Horse of Her Dreams
Thoroughbred #24
by Allison Estes
Published: 1998

It's time to come clean. I have not previously read Thoroughbred books 24-46, 49-50, 56, 62, 64-66 and 68. I could throw in #61, Parker's Passion for good measure, because it bored me enough to give up on it about three chapters in, and I never bothered to pick it back up again.

These are the facts as I present them to you. The reviews I post for the next very long stretch of books are my first impressions, and they will also be my last. Probably. Unless I have some unadvised change of heart in another ten to twenty years and start to read these books over again. Since I can't see myself doing that when I'm 46, we'll just focus on the present. This is the Whitebrook Farm Blog's second review of The Horse of Her Dreams (and my first read!). Yes, I am pathetically excited about this.

Based on this cover, Sterling is one of the ugliest horses on the face of the earth. If this is what Christina desperately wanted to replace Wonder's Legacy with, the girl must have been at her last resort. Christina also has this odd, vacant expression that's just a tad creepy. Add to that the glazed eyes and she looks like a blind person trying to decipher things by touch. I'm also enjoying the late '90s fashion in the Doc Martens and baggy clothing. It's like high school all over again.

Will Christina risk it all to save Sterling Dream?

Twelve-year-old Christina Reese is the luckiest girl in the world. She lives at the Whitebrook Farm with her dad, Mike, and her mother, Ashleigh Griffen, one of the most famous jockeys ever. And when Christina asked for a horse for her birthday she got Wonder's Legacy, the last foal of her mom's famous racehorse, Wonder.

But Christina doesn't feel so lucky. Everyone expects her to become a jockey, but Christina wants to be an Event rider. All she needs is the perfect horse. Then she sees Sterling Dream, a beautiful gray mare who's being forced to race against her will. Will Christina risk everything she has to take a chance on a Dream?

Plot:
Well, the great nine year gap has come and gone, dropping us off in Christina's incredibly awkward tween years. She's recently turned 12, and the absolutely most horrible thing has happened to her. She's been given a horse for her birthday. Damn it! Yes, somehow the wires get crossed and instead of listening to their daughter, Mike and Ashleigh bequeath upon Christina the last known foal of Wonder: Wonder's Legacy. This is like Christina's nightmare, because two months later she still thinks back on this wretched event and starts crying. Admittedly, I can understand her frustration. Instead of being given a horse she can actually ride, she's given a yearling racehorse she has no connection to. It's kinda what my father did to me on my sixteenth birthday when he gave me a newly cut key to the car we already owned and was not intended for my sole use. You know...it's just not exactly what anyone wants as a gift. I'm not even sure we need to mention the weirdness in handing a horse to your 12-year-old daughter and then telling her that she can't ride it. Not to mention this horse is co-owned by Brad Townsend. Isn't that just saddling your pre-teen daughter with more angst and responsibility than she needs EVER?

There is, of course, more to the story. It's not only that Christina has been forbidden to ride Legacy, it's that she wants a horse she can train to jump (and she ain't doing that with a two-year-old racehorse). Because, gasps all abound, she doesn't like horse racing. This seems a little like sacrilege for a main character to say such things in a series previously all about horse racing, but apparently with the ousting of Cindy and Karen Bentley, Harper Collins got rid of horse racing also. Granted, I'll be the first to stand up and say the plotlines were getting old by Cindy's Honor (we can only run in the Breeders' Cup so many times before it starts to wear thin), so I'm actually enjoying the change right now. We'll see how long that lasts.

Anyway, Christina goes to her riding lesson at Mona's stable, which is a quick jaunt by horseback away from Whitebrook. Mona sees that Christina has rapidly outgrown her pony, Tribulation, and reassures Christina that her mother did put lots of thought into giving her Legacy and that she just doesn't understand Christina's devotion to eventing. I find all of this pretty unlikely considering Mona is apparently Ashleigh's best friend, and you'd think the two of them might actually discuss Christina's lessons, but it looks like the two never talk because Ashleigh seems to be in a serious state of ignorance. So the two of them decide that Christina will enter Mona's gelding, Foster, in an upcoming event so Christina can show her stuff and Ashleigh will come to understand by simply watching her daughter's unspoken desire to have a horse she can ride and actually enjoy it. Because no one ever sits anyone down and has a serious discussion in this series.

Before we know it, Mona is instructing Christina to go get Foster and we'll see how they do. Christina scampers off to do just that, but runs into Dylan, our resident twelve-year-old heartthrob who has an affinity for chaps with fringe. Christina is all flustered because prepubescent boys wearing fringed chaps are just so hot, and naturally she can't think straight as her blood starts rushing to inappropriate places. This doesn't distract her too much, because she manages to ride Foster and wins the admiration of Dylan in the process. In the face of this new Foster development, Ashleigh relents and lets Christina start having a hand in Legacy's training, which means she finally gets to learn how to exercise ride.

So Christina does start to get closer to Legacy, just as Dylan asks her to the upcoming school dance, which is like the best thing that's happened to Christina since being allowed to ride Foster and learn how to exercise, which was, like, yesterday. Wow, Chris is on a roll. Anyway, riding on her high from Dylan's invite to the dance, Christina pretty much dreamwalks down to the stable and decides to ride Legacy. They gallop around in the hills and just as she's decided that she's proven to herself she can gallop Legacy (I guess that was the point?), the horse bolts and jumps over the fallen tree. Thrilled by this development, Chris jumps him over the tree again and again and discovered he's diving over the jumps. Which is supposedly dangerous? Chris files him into her "lost cause" folder and thinks nothing more of it.

Until Ashleigh informs her she saw all of it (with her super jockey gaze, or did she have a telephoto lens on her person so she could view everything from her house?) and says jumping Legacy at two is the stupidest thing Christina could have done. Which you'd figure someone who's spent their entire life around horses would know already, given that you don't start racing any horse until they're at least halfway through their two-year-old year, if they race at all at two. Christina claims ignorance and starts sobbing, stating that she just wanted to ride him. Granted, I feel her pain. She's twelve, she wants a horse she can ride, and Ashleigh finally figures it out. So she promises she'll try to let Christina in on the training and Christina promises not to ride without Ashleigh's permission. Seems to be sorted. But then everything falls apart when her parents insist she go to New York with them the weekend of the dance and the (E)vent! Well, now we've got to sob and proclaim that life is not fair.

However, soon Christina is all dazzled by the city, and who wouldn't be when you're staying at The Plaza and eat dinner at Tavern-on-the-Green. These were places I, like, stared at longingly when I was Christina's age and in New York for the first time, so she'd damn well better be dazzled. She forgets that she was pissed off and gets all swept up in New York, but then Melanie comes along. Melanie is thoroughly intimidating to Christina, as Melanie makes it known she's not too impressed with her. Plus, Melanie has piercings and Kool-Aid colored hair and bright, apparently fashionable, clothes. If Melanie and Cindy had ever met under the same circumstances Cindy would be remarking to herself that Melanie's a stuck up bitch within ten seconds, I am sure. Christina, being an entirely different creature, struggles to please her demanding cousin by changing her order to a vegetarian meal and noting what Melanie approves of or not so she can rush to gain Melanie's good opinion.

Fortunately that all goes to hell pretty quickly when the two go riding in Central Park. Melanie picks out Milky Way, a horse for beginners, and sticks Christina with Kenwood, a horse who is, to say the least, easily crazed. Christina picks up on the nefariousness of Melanie's plan when she listens in on two people talking near her who happen to be talking about the horses Mel and Chris will be riding. How lucky for her. Anyway, Kenwood does his antics and Christina rides it out because she's just awesome, I guess, and then she turns on Melanie and calls her out. Melanie doesn't like this, especially when Christina insults her "beginner" status as a rider. And the second curse word is uttered in the series (I somehow missed "damn" back in Ashleigh's Farewell) when Melanie yells at Christina about how she's not impressed by any of her "crap." Because Christina has a mommy and a daddy and Melanie only has a father who fell face first into some horrible fashion faux pas. Christina yells back at her that she's just jealous, and apparently she hit the mark because Melanie just starts laughing and lets it all slide. I don't see this happening realistically between tween girls, because as anyone who has ever been a twelve-year-old female will tell you, there's the obligatory period of silence after a fight, the chance to stab your opponent in the back, another blow up to go through, yet another obligatory period of silence, and then, in fifteen years, if you still know each other, you might make up and become friends again.

Anyway. Enter Sterling. Christina stumbles across the mare's groom hauling the horse around and basically discovers that this poor, mistreated animal is her dream horse. Because it's gray. As if there aren't tons of other gray horses out there, or anything. Because the groom creeps Christina out, and by all rights he really should, she decides to become like every Disney heroine of yore and climbs up into the rafters of the barn to stare down into the mare's stall so she can witness the abuse up close and personal. This doesn't work out too well because the groom sees her and does this comical and yet creepy pointing at her silently as he beats the horse some more. And Cindy wanted to sleep at the racetrack with characters like this roaming around. How Cindy survived at night is anyone's guess.

Sterling runs in her race, but instead of winning she does the absolute opposite and jumps the inside rail and lands in the turf course. Then she heads for the outside rail of the turf course and jumps back into the dirt course. Then, just for good measure, she jumps the outside rail of the dirt course and presumably trots off into the backside with her jockey, who has foolishly stayed on this whole time. I'm sure his fellow jockeys are going to tear into him later, but that's his own stupid fault. Anyway, Christina is thrilled by this development and decides that Sterling is the one.

Finally, Ashleigh pulls her head out of the sand and realizes that her daughter wants not only a horse she can event with...she wants Sterling. During Legacy's race, Christina runs into Sterling's owner, who informs her that he's put Sterling in a claiming race only a day or so after she already ran. Seems unlikely, but whatever. So they rush to put a claim on her, assume they won the horse, and then discover that this other woman also put a claim in on it. So they draw numbers and the other woman gets the draw and Christina loses the horse.

Then the most ridiculous thing happens: Christina offers to trade Legacy for Sterling. Which you'd think would be impossible because of several factors, one among them being that the woman expressly turned down the claim tag plus the $2,500 Mike offers her for Sterling because she specifically wants the mare. Why she'd trade is beyond me, but she does and Christina is immediately given one out of five stars by every Thoroughbred fan on the face of the earth, despite the fact that this book is probably the most well written of the twenty-four books I've read so far. Yes, better than the Joanna books.

Oddities:

• Ian's attitude at the beginning of this book is just so freakishly upbeat I am a little taken aback. Legacy is the greatest Wonder baby that has ever lived and we are so super excited about all his championship potential! Yay! Yay! YAY! *grabs Christina's arm and starts shaking it hysterically* Ian needs to lay off the coffee, methinks.

• Why is The Terminator at stud when he was nothing but a claimer that should have been gelded?

• Yeah, it's not common practice to just change a racehorse's name. If Leap of Faith was racing before Whitebrook purchased her and Mike then renamed her Leap of Faith he'd need a damn good reason, and I don't think whimsy counts as a reason.

• I'm trying to figure out why the word "event" is constantly capitalized. If Allison thinks it's a proper noun, all the nouns in this book would be capitalized and we'd have even more confusion than normal.

• "You're light as a feather." says Dylan, and Christina can't help blushing furiously again and wonders if he's kidding. Personally, I'm always convinced men of all ages say crap like this to exhibit their strength in a masculine attempt at preening, but then I could always be wrong.

• Kevin says something about "the parents" and Chris echoes about how she doesn't want "the parents" to find out she'd fallen off the horse. This reminds me a little of some girl who called her parents "the parental units" before she had her boyfriend kill them. It's creeping me out a little.
  

• Anna and Naomi are both sixteen-year-old girls acting like twentysomethings with permanent jobs as Whitebrook exercise riders. Where do these girls live and what the hell is going on with them?

• Christina is twelve and she claims to not know where Belmont Park is when she lives at a well-known horse racing/breeding farm? Has she never been forced to watch a Triple Crown race before or heard anything about Wonder's races? The mare she claims to be in love with at the beginning of the book?

• Chris, Ashleigh and Mike stay in the Plaza Hotel. I've done the whole Manhattan to Belmont Park adventure that is public transportation, and I've got to say that's one hell of a long ride every day. However, at least they're not staying in a "fancy motel" as it was in Joanna Campbell's golden days.

• Interesting Factoid: Clarebrook, where Melanie rides, is actually Claremont, which closed permanently on April 29th, 2007. I always wanted to see how that worked, and now I can't. Thank you New York, for failing to maintain your bridle paths.

• Sterling rears before the gate and the jockey comes off, so he takes out his anger on her by smacking her across her hindquarters with his crop. Uh, no. This is Belmont, not a bush track.
  
  
• I just love Sterling's owner's reaction to discovering that his trainer and groom were just assholes the whole ten years he was a thoroughbred owner. He states that he's done with horses, seems to have sold them all off, and then blows up at the groom and yells repeatedly that he's done with horses and that the groom is fired and he can leave. Oh, and so can the trainer. Um...if he's done with horses and therefore does not own horses anymore, why is he bothering? The last I checked you can't fire someone who doesn't work for you.
  

Allison Estes does a good job with the plotline that she's given, but it's no wonder everyone had a fit when this book was published. Eventing and trading Wonder's last super special offspring for a claimer-turned-eventer? This book could have been published on gold plates and it still would have received one star. So I feel for Allison. I do. Because otherwise she's good at her job and makes the Karen Bentley era look like Harper Collins put an evil toddler in charge of the Cindy books.

Plus, how much do I love that Cindy isn't even referenced in this book? Seriously, it's like sweet justice.

(Also, double and triple reviews for books will start popping up as, crazy as it seems, there are four of us blogging away here. Just to inform all you gentle readers out there. Want a second opinion? Read Monique's The Horse of Her Dreams review here.)

If it wasn't for those meddling kids! TB #16: Glory In Danger

Glory In Danger
by Karen Bentley
Thoroughbred #16
Originally Published: 1996

Mara and Monique bring to you the first joint review! So we're going to try to keep it all straight and the hilarity to an absolute maximum. Because obviously. Just look at the cover.

Mara: Isn't this cover the most unintentionally hilarious thing? The menacing shadow, the rearing horse, the look of shock and horror! I keep expecting Cindy to scream: "Back! Back evil doer!" And another thing: the proportions are all off. Either Cindy has amazingly long legs, is standing on a box, or she's actually taller than Glory. All in all, it's probably the stupidest, not to mention ugliest, cover in Thoroughbred history.

Monique: I just look at her atrocious sweater and I vomit in my mouth a little. Is it that color to blend in with Glory's spew? I don't think Cindy has enough clothes, given the fact that she thinks a 'couple of t-shirts' is enough for a whole month. Maybe she wears them stiff. Also, the man with the syringe? I am egging him on and I hope he gets Cindy instead.

Will Glory ever race again?

Cindy Blake's champion Thoroughbred, Glory, is winning every race he enters. With Ashleigh as his jockey, he burns up the track. When he wins an important race by over ten lengths, track official become suspicious. They figure the winning streak can only mean on thing. The horse is being drugged to improve his performance. Then Glory tests positive for dangerous drugs and is disqualified from the race.

Cindy fears that someone wants to put an end to Glory's career. Worse than that, the same drugs that made Glory run faster could also kill him. Cindy must find out who's trying to hurt Glory. But when Cindy starts to investigate, her own life becomes endangered, too!

The Plot, brought to you by Mara:

1. Drugs! Everyone is using them, trying to abstain from them, or in withdrawal from them. Quite a heavy topic for a book shelved in the independent reader section at Borders. So, the thing is Glory is super fantastic. Flightful is just sort of super fantastic. The difference here is great indeed, causing Flightful's trainer (who is not Brad Townsend, so he gets a bit of a reprieve in this book to go be dark, handsome, smoldering, and awesome somewhere else) gets a case of the green eyed monster and hires this vet to drug/kill Glory. Cindy catches the culprit, because naturally it would take a twelve-year-old to do what a whole team of adults and security officials couldn't. Because twelve-year-olds can do anything!

Okay, I've covered the moral of the story. Oh, also: don't do drugs, drug helpless animals, or take out a college loan.

Oddities, brought to you by Mara:

• So, Champion is born. Ashleigh remarks on how strong he is because "most foals can hardly stand up right after they're born." Um, isn't it a fact that if foals don't stand up right after they're born there's something drastically wrong with them?

• Wonder's Pride finally has a sire, guys. It's Townsend Prince. Sure, later on Joanna Campbell stated she'd always meant Baldasar to be Pride's sire, and that's held up as canon, but Townsend Prince? That's some serious inbreeding going on there.

• Okay, let's keep count. The "fastest horses in the world" now include Townsend Princess and March to Glory.

• *cough* Actually, Brad and Lavinia didn't insist on running Princess in the Blue Grass. They didn't pressure anyone to run an injured horse. No one knew Princess was injured. Is it that impossible to remember facts from one book to another?

• Seriously? Mr. Wonderful strains a tendon in April and they're actually considering not running him in the Breeders' Cup in October because of this? Plus, he hasn't even run in anything other than a maiden race yet, which he lost, and they're assuming he's Juvy material?

• Bentley has to degrade Townsend Princess and Mr. Wonderful to make Champion all the better. This has never ceased to annoy me. What else annoys me? The fact that Cindy named him Wonder's Champion.

• Cindy gets called to the principal's office to talk to a reporter about her human interest story involving Glory. Because she's special, damn it. Don't forget, readers! She's special! Not to mention famous! She's a celebrity, and she tells herself this frequently. So she tells the reporter that Glory's abusers got "long sentences" and the reporter replies, "prison's tough these days." Like it wasn't before? This conversation is so absurd.

• Max wishes her and Glory luck in their next race and Cindy brushes it off, saying that they "don't need" it. Glory's so fast, luck is not important!

• I really, really don't remember Rory turning up in this book. He's been off at private school? Sammy runs over to hug him like they're long lost lovers, and somehow Tor has never met him before? This all seems highly unlikely. Then Tor frowns while Cindy wonders if Tor thinks Rory knows more about horses than he does. Uh, Cindy, I don't think that's what he's frowning about. I have this theory that ever since Angelique he's just waiting for Samantha to run off with someone better.

• Now Sierra is the "most promising steeplechaser in the world"(!).

• Ian cautions Cindy to not get a big head about her newspaper article, but his advice goes unheard. Cindy feels smug anyway. Beth reinforces her notion that she's a celebrity and takes her to school because she's too special for the bus. Then Max reinforces it. Then Cindy's teacher reinforces it. Cindy ponders how wonderful it will be to be even more famous after Glory's a champion. The urge to smack Cindy increases.

• Cindy is walking around with Glory and gets too close to Brad's chestnut colt, and then blames Brad for walking his colt to Glory when it reads like Cindy's the one leading her horse straight up to Brad. This is so annoying. If you want to blame certain actions on a character, make it clear that they are actually causing a problem.

• I find it amusing that everyone decides to not tell Mike about their brushes with the Townsends, or they flat out refuse to let him go places that might involve interacting with the Townsends. I keep wondering if Bentley has this fantasy of Brad and Mike beating the crap out of each other over Ashleigh.

• Glory's allowance race is the most piss poor attempt at writing a race scene that I've ever seen. Also, you can't hear a horse's hoofbeats during a race if you're up in the stands on a crowded race day like the Kentucky Derby.

• Aren't privacy fences the sign of lower class people trying to act upper class? If so, why do the Alexanders have one? Couldn't we call it a giant rock wall instead?

• Glory has a half-brother! Oh, let the world shout its joy! Only, the thing is this foal is out of a mare who is not Glory's dam. The only claim to fame of this mare is she's by Just Victory. This is like a minor and insignificant relation in the real world.

• Ben tells Cindy that she knows how much it costs to run Whitebrook. Um, no. I'm fairly confident she doesn't have a clue.

• Who the hell drives a trailer of racehorses through Manhattan?

• The stupidest idea in the history of Thoroughbred: Cindy wonders if she has time for a little nap in Glory's stall. Because sleeping in hay on the backside of a racetrack is so freaking comfortable, right?

• Bentley is so bad at writing race scenes. Just, so bad. Everyone is talking to describe the action, which never happens, Glory is using himself up early in every race but somehow wins going away, and it would appear that Flightful's jockey has no idea that a crop is a strategic aid.

• I find it amusing that Max's mom drives into New York City to go sightseeing and then parks "near" the Empire State Building. God forbid these people ever take mass transit.

• I really doubt the crowd would boo Shining after Glory was disqualified for testing positive. This is the betting public here, which isn't the best crowd to set the moral high bar.

• A horse usually has to finish up the track in order to say it "didn't fire." Shining finished second. A neck back in second. She just lost, okay? Say it with me, Ashleigh. Shining lost. One more time: Shining lost. Okay. Now we can move on.

• First Whitebrook has had a bunch of big winners and now they're in financial trouble, so it's important to keep Shining racing in the big races. My are we forgetful.

• Holy crap, a Whitebrook horse came in last. I just feel this should be documented.

• Finally Cindy gets to sleep in Glory's stall for the night. At a racetrack. With a person sneaking around with access to heroin and (possibly dirty) hypodermic needles. Does this sound like great parenting or what? I bet you somewhere Cindy's child welfare agent is developing a nervous tick.

• Great, now Cindy and Max are practically having a slumber party in Glory's stall. Who's going to appear with their sleeping bag next? Tor? Caroline? Brad?

• Ooh, a black gloved hand is trying to hurt Glory! Again I'm reminded of every soap opera ever made.

• "Put down the hypodermic nice and slow." Oh, this just kills me. Jim then throws the hypodermic down and it shatters, which from all I can tell is impossible. The needle itself is stainless steel and the syringe is always plastic unless he's got some weird glass syringe he needs for conducting quantitative chemical analysis or something distinctly non-veterinary or illicit drug use oriented.

• The reason behind it all: Jim is the son of the guy that abused Glory. He targeted Cindy and Glory in some sort of ill conceived attempt at payback. Yes, it's deranged and makes little sense. Also, it reminds me a little of Scream. Just without the blood, knives, guns, sex and drunkenness.

• Um, okay, the second reason behind it all: college loans! Oh, and Flightful's trainer is a poor sport.

• And we end it with another mediocre race scene. The talking really needs to stop.

Oddities, brought to you by Monique:

• I just ADORE how Cindy is the Official Horse Namer of Whitebrook. I mean, Rainbow and Four Leaf Clover are such catchy, grand names after all.

• Rory! Sigh. I love the whole anti-Tor vibe. Of course, that might just be me.

• Is it just me, or is hearing Cindy's inner thoughts about everything getting seriously old?

• Ah! Max also wears dark green. Perhaps he and Cindy match deliberately.

• If I was a vet and I was putting a horse down, I'd also give it to a 12 year old to hold. Because that just makes so much sense.

• Ms. Bentley seems to think tossing in big names for veterinary drugs is impressive. I can also use Google, darling. Also, how does Cindy have this knowledge? And why? She's 12. Does she not have fun?

• Joe Gallagher is this book's Brad Townsend. Only ugly.

• I really like the name Flightful. It is about the best thing about this book.

• When Shining loses, Cindy blames Ashleigh and Ashleigh blames herself. Lets just forget about her slip in the gate and Ashleigh nearly falling, shall we?

• I also talk to horses that are far away telepathically in my mind. It works, I tell you.

• Whitebrook has this new-found obsession with winning.

• Beth. is. the. most. useless. character. ever.

• Oh, when I write a book, all my characters will state the obvious too, and make it seem like a big deal. "Oh, look, Glory! The sky is blue! Wow!"

• When Glory is freaking out, I would so have given him to Len to handle and not Cindy. But, I clearly don't have their undying faith in her awesome talents.

• Glory breaks out the gate badly and Ian goes, "I suppose it had to happen sometime." Head, this is desk. Desk, meet head.

• Foreshadowing! Ashleigh has nausea and headaches! Um gee, I wonder why?

Monique: Onward to Ashleigh Gets Knocked Up and Ruins Glory's Chances of Victory as he Cannot Run For Any Other Jockey. AKA Ashleigh's Farewell. I am so excited.