Gather Riding Lessons (Riding Lessons, #1) Illustrated By Sara Gruen Accessible In File

it was hard for me to like the main character, Annemarie Zimmer, Even a little bit. Shes selfcentered, socially inept, and she flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, Shes a walking nightmare, and yet shes not a complete lost cause, She does try, however miserably, and she always ends up failing, but theres something to be said for effort, right

There is something to be said for the tragic character, and in many respects thats exactly what Annemarie is.
And if it hadnt been for Sara Gruens deft hand, RIDING LESSONS might have been lacking, In fact, I might have turned away completely,

But I didnt, My fingers pressed against my Kindle, as I turned page after electronic page, and I began to realize that Annemarieat least to a certain extentwas a victim of her own circumstances, those from her past and those she had yet to face.
She may not have been able to completely save herself, or her daughter, or in some cases even her family, but she was broken and flawed and she popped right off of the page as real as life itself.


Sometimes thats what we need to see in life, And I was okay with that, If you enjoy engaging reads with characters you may not totally enjoy or completely agree with, you might enjoy this one well enough, If not, you may want to set your sights elsewhere,

sitelinkCrossposted at Robert's Reads Annemarie Zimmer had been a gifted equestrian, Olympic quality, when atshe and her beloved horse Harry had a devastating jumping accident.
Annemarie spent months in the hospital learning to walk again and Harry's injuries were beyond repair the beautiful brindled horse had to be destroyed, Annemarie vowed she would never ride again and as soon as she graduated high school she moved away from her parent's horse farm, Now, atyears old, Annemarie just had a day that rivals the horrible circumstances of the accident: she has just been laidoff from her editing job, her husband has told her he is leaving her for another woman, and her mother has just called with the news that
Annemarie's father is dying from ALS.
With heryear old daughter Eva in tow, Annemarie heads back to New Hampshire and the hated horse farm,

Annemarie feels that the best way to help her parents is to take over the management of the farm leaving her mother able to be with her husband as much as possible.
Unfortunately, Annemarie's outspoken personality soon has customers removing their horses from the boarding facility and their children from the riding school, Soon the farm is bleeding money and Annemarie cannot keep the business going much longer, Then, a beautiful brindle horse is brought to the farm by Annemarie's onetime boyfriend Dan, a dedicated veterinarian, The horse looks so much like the long departed Harry that Annemarie becomes obsessed with him, As she researches the horse's history, Annemarie stumbles across a mystery and what is possibly a crime,

The story is not bad but Annemarie is not a terribly likable woman, Certainly she had a difficult time in her past but she seems a bit selfabsorbed, Her relationship with her teen daughter is contentious with her parents, chilly and dismissive, The mystery of the horse is a good one and the fate of Annemarie's father is both shocking and unresolved, I bought this book because I loved Water for Elephants, but I think my expectations were too high, returnreturnI was horseobsessed as a kid, This is a book about a woman who loves horses, and who lost her beloved horse in a tragic accidentyears before and is still living with the consequences.
It sounds like a good match, However, the heroine, Annemarie, is completely unlikeable, She's mean, petty and selfish, and drags everyone down with her, Her husband leaves her for another woman, she is fired, and she returns to her parents' riding school to find her father is suffering from ALS.
Oh, and her teenage daughter is an absolute witch, I kept reading with the hope that Annemarie would mature as a character and she did at the very end, By then I was skimming through the book trying to make it end as fast as possible, returnreturnThe writing is good, and Gruen again excels at writing about abused animals and the recovery they can make with love and patience, I understood that Gruen was trying to make Annemarie completely human and flawed, She did a very good job of that, The problem was that Annemarie didn't really have any redeeming qualities, and I knew if I met her in person she would be just as cold and condescending towards me.
returnreturnI will not be buying the sequel, As a worldclass equestrian 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, the beautiful horse she cherished, 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 teenage daughter to this place of pain and memory, where ghosts of an unresolved youth still haunt the fields and stablesand 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 yet again with one glimpse of a white striped gelding startlingly similar to the one Annemarie lost in another lifetime.
And an obsession is born that could shatter her fragile world, I was torn while reading this book because I found the main character thoroughly unlikeable, Every action she took was so obviously a plot device I could see the consequences of her bad judgment coming a mile away and thought it was unbelievable and insulting to the reader that a character would act in such an obviously illogical manner.
That said and main character aside, the writing itself was phenomenal, I sat up untilam this morning finishing the book because I just didn't want to put it down, This is the same author who wrote Water for Elephants which was one of the best books I read last year, I found the same delight in her descriptions, turns of phrase and the way she made me want to keep reading, Unfortunately, while I found the characters in Elephant to be interesting and imperfect, making human mistakes as they navigated their lives, AnneMarie in Riding Lessons was nothing but a caricature of a harried, middleaged divorcee.
I recently lost two afternoons of potential farm work due to a fabulous gutwrencher of a horsey novel: Riding Lessons, by Sara Gruen,

Sara is much more famous for Water for Elephants, her New York Times bestseller, I never got around to reading it and all six of the local copies were checked out, so I suppose its still quite popular,

But this book oh, it is unapologetic in its horsiness, She could have dumbed it down and made it a bestseller, perhaps, and I love her so much for keeping it technical, Youll just have to know the difference between French and German dressage, wont you, if you want to understand why the new trainer has such an impact on the main character, and if you cant decipher why she would have preferred the bit wasnt a slow twist, well youll just have to wonder forever.
Or take the effort to google it,

see it all! sitelink wordpress I once had a gentleman friend extremely fond of the phrase, "Over the top," although he pronounced it, "Overrrr de TOPP," for reasons I won't go into.


In any case, that phrase recurred in my brain as I read this book, Gruen is a good writer, but an editor really needed to slap her hand away from the crisis button during the review of this book.
I mean, the main character is getting divorced, barely on speaking terms with her parents, oh wait, her father is dying so that helps things in that scenario, she has a teenage daughter running out of control and she's a terrible parent naturally, she's heading toward financial ruin, she's sleeping with an old flame, she's afraid to ride again, she has acquired a horse under suspicious legal circumstances, she's flirting with a Frenchman, the French guy has a mustache, she's drinking too much and taking Valiums like they're canapes at a boring weddingit's exhausting to read and with all that going on, who has time to give a crap about the characters Although naturally it's pleasing to realize that, perhaps with Hollywood in mind, everything will be resolved by the final page of the book, when finances are going great, she's riding her newly acquired horse, she's reconciled with her daughter, mother and husband, has mourned her father's death but not too much, etc.
, etc. , yawn, yawn.

Also, although Gruen is a good writer, this book is a textbook case of telling not showing,

Disappointing. Booko
What can I say,

. . I was reading the book and enjoying it and then I just had to go on Amazon to see what the other reviews said and once I read those, that's all I could think about when I went back to reading it.
But what I did like: the imagery, Chapter after chapter I could picture the horses, the barns, the riding lessons, the tack room, the stalls, . . I even imagined the trainer to look like the one I had in High School, In one of the chapters, describing a riding lesson, I could totally see myself on the horse, trainer walking beside me, telling me to post on the opposite diagonal.
It was all familar to me, and so very easy for me to imagine, What I wasn't so fond of: The main character is a bit annoying, She had an accident atwhich pretty much defines her life for the nextyears, . . she continually runs from the reality of what happened and from having to move on from that, And she really screws things up aboutway into the book, And then that part is a struggle to get through because, but the end does get better, All in all, not a bad read, and enjoyable for me if for no other reason than it takes me back to my days of riding when I was in High School.


I own this book,