Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #582533 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-27
• Formats: Audiobook, Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 9
• Binding: Audio CD

Customer Reviews

Excellent page turner
From the terrific opening chapter where Olympic hopeful Annemarie Zimmerman has the accident which will shape her life, this book keeps you hooked. Annemarie, the narrator, is not always likeable but the reader cannot help being swept along with her as she struggles to make a new start in life, understand her family and come to terms with what happened 18 years ago. Gruen has got a suberb writing style, literate but non-flashy, fluent and with an excellent sense of pacing so the action never flags. She is also superb at conveying the magic of horses without this book being in any sense 'horsey'. Though much of the action of the book is concerned with Annemarie's search to find out who her rescue horse really is this is a story about people and their relationships to each other and it is very well done indeed. Some of the charecterisation could have been deeper - Eva the 15 year old daughter is tiresomely one note in her never-ending stroppiness - and Gruen veers into straight cliches at times - such as the French riding instructor who can whip up a superb meal just like that. Even so, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Reccomended.

Great first chapter, pity about the next twenty
After a terrific opening this novel soon deteriorates into an unlikely run of bad luck and bad writing. The plot revolves around a tragic riding accident followed, years later, by a failed marriage, dysfunctional daughter, dying father, cold-hearted mother and assorted equine-related hangers-on.

The characters are one-dimensional and unlikable, especially the self-obsessed narrator. The horsey bits are mostly good but the rest, the majority of the book, is a whole muck-heap load of irritating nonsense interspersed with trivial detail. Well that's just my opinion. Some people seem to like it, and Gruen's subsequent novel, Water For Elephants, was a US best-seller, but I think she'd learnt a bit more about writing by then.