Book Log 34/2009 - Always There

[jacey]

Lauren Brook – Always There – Heartland #20

Having decided to write a horses and magic book aimed at 9 – 12 year olds I was looking for a modern version of the once ubiquitous horse book for my own research purposes. This was the closest I could find. Only after I’d bought it did I realise that it was one in a long-running series, issued at the rate of about two per year. It’s set at Heartland, a horse farm in Virginia where the owners specialise in curing injured and traumatised horses. 

Amy is the central character, the daughter of Heartland’s late founder, Marion, who was killed in a trailer accident for which Amy still feels partly responsible, having persuaded her mother out into a storm to rescue a horse.

Amy has a boyfriend, Ty, who works at Heartland and she is, of course, a gifted rider and horse rehabilitator (using horse-whisperer techniques), but Amy is reaching a turning point in her life. She’s graduating with good grades and has a place at college to study to be a vet but she’s not sure she should go. She is, in fact, scared that either she will be missed too much – or conversely not at all. She sees Ty and Joni, the groom, already stepping in to make decisions which are rightfully hers and she’s jealous. She can’t let go. Leaving Heartland, her responsibilities to her beloved horses, her family and Ty are weighting heavily on her mind.

So when they get a new horse to help and it seems as though she’s being kept in the dark about something, she starts to get annoyed and not a little petulant. It turns out that her older sister has been trying to protect her from the knowledge that this horse was injured in an accident very like the one that killed Amy’s mother a couple of years earlier.

Angst ensues, but in the end the selfless Ty gets Amy to see that she should not pass up on the opportunity to go to college and that she’ll never lose her place at Heartland.

This is a slight book (152 pages), not badly written, but simply written to provide little in the way of challenging material. Amy seems a lot younger than eighteen, especially in the very non-physical relationship she has with Ty – who is at least a couple of years older. There’s no sex in this book even though, realistically, few eighteen year olds in a settled relationship with an older boy would remain celibate without even considering the possibilities of getting physical. Amy seems to be completely lacking in hormones. If Ty has hormones he keeps them to himself. That’s not a criticism – maybe the books are read by girls at the very young end of YA and therefore the ‘no sex’ rule may be a publisher’s decision. I just find it weird when – in this day and age – teen books are generally bristling with sexual questions. On looking up some of the reader reviews on a Lauren Brooke site I’d guess that most of the review writers are not much more than about twelve, and possibly younger, so I guess LB knows her market.

Not my usual reading material, and I won’t be searching out any other Heartland books, but interesting for what it is.

Comments

[hairmonger.livejournal.com]

When I was reading horse books (as a child in the early sixties) because I was too allergic to horses to have much contact with the real thing the romance elements made me impatient. Get back to the horses! I grumbled.

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I read horse books as a child but there were never any romantic sub-plots until Monica Edwards started to write a growing attraction between two reguklar characters. It seemed perfectly natural as they were 14 and 16 at the time and not having the boyfriend subplot would have been less realistic. By the tiome I read this I was ready to read the romance bits, I think.

Other pony books were strictly about ponies in Britain in the 1950s