I don’t know why, for the longest time I’ve had this title on my TBR list thinking it was a memoir. Nope, it’s fiction. It was a good read, though. Not the best, but kept me turning all the pages to the end, to see what would happen. Some things I saw coming a mile away, and others took me by surprise. The writing was not always smooth, the main character was rather dislikable- very self centered and oblivious to what was really going on around her- and yet kind of sympathetic, too. I can imagine that many in her situation would find themselves blinded to reality, desperate to hold onto something as things familiar fall apart.
The main character has just lost her job, and her husband suddenly leaves her for a younger woman. Struggling through the divorce by mostly ignoring what’s happening, she goes home to stay on her mother’s horse farm, taking along the headstrong teenage daughter she’s having difficulties with. It’s quickly clear that she doesn’t have a good relationship with her parents, and slowly pieces are added to the story. A father who put a lot of pressure on her to succeed in the past, at one particular thing. A devastating accident where she lost her riding partner- a beloved, talented horse of strikingly unusual color. The trauma was so bad she never got on a horse again. But now, someone nearby with a horse rescue stable, brings to their corrall another horse that looks almost exactly like her lost competition mount. There’s only one explanation for how another horse of such uncommon appearance could show up again. She throws all her focus into solving that- even though she’s supposed to be managing the stable and taking care of things for her mother, while her father is dying from an incurable medical condition (another thing she’s ignoring). Things go from bad to worse on all sides- her father’s condition worsens, her daughter gets into even more objectionable activities (although I really thought the protagonist’s reactions here were exaggerated), her mother barely speaks to her, and she’s doing a terrible job at managing the riding stable- in fact, they’re imminently threatened with loosing it altogether. I’m not a business person, and even I could see that she was making one bad decision after another, there.
But she can’t deal with any of that, because she’s so focused on the rescue horse who cannot be handled, and the puzzle about his background which turns into something that threatens her with loss again. Meanwhile there’s this awkward triangle of love interests going on- a man she has history with is their on-call veterinarian, and she’s finding the French riding instructor attractive, but won’t admit it. (I didn’t care much for the romance aspect of this book, although some readers will find it more of a focus that the horse stuff). I really couldn’t see how this story would have any kind of happy ending, as this woman seemed determined to wreck everything she touched (which appallingly, she even recognized). But in the end, it does wrap things up satisfyingly- in a manner I wouldn’t have expected, and it didn’t feel too forced. I’m a tad curious to read the sequel- which I also have- but ready to drop it at any point if it’s boring me . . .
The weird thing is that, for all I disliked the main character, I could feel a smidge of sympathy towards her as well. How many of us have tried again and again, things that we fail at? And you have to keep going with something. She did go back to her family, even though she had bitter memories there. She did attempt to help her mother run the stable, although would have done far better to admit her lack of experience, and her mistakes as she made them, instead of digging herself deeper into a hole. I think that’s really what kept me reading. Because it was so darn realistic, how flawed this woman was, floundering around trying to put her life back together without really knowing how. And it was the horse that saved her, in a way. At least it got her interested in something again.
