Appaloosa Summer
Series: Island Trilogy, Book 1
By: Tudor Robins: Narrated By: Cody Sterna
Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
Sweet and has its charm… and thank GOSH—little Teen Angst to be found!
I got Appaloosa Summer cuz it has a horse in it, for gosh sake! How can you say no to that?!
That said? Okay so, like, I DIDN’T read the Publisher’s Summary… but I DID check out the reviews… and when all of them say Voluntarily received a free copy and left an honest review? And when quotable reviews are all: An Amazon Customer?
Uhm… uh oh…
Sooo, I did NOT have high hopes for the story, and I went in with a reeeeally low bar.
And was happily surprised (Lesson: A low bar in Life means Pleasant Surprises!) by the charm and slow-pace of this.
It opens with author Tudor Robins showing her horse-jumping chops where our heroine Meg is in a competition with her much-loved Major, Horse Extraordinaire responding to her cues and getting ready to make a jump. Crash and Bang and Meg is trapped beneath Major as he’s collapsed, dying in the ring before a jump.
In shock, and somewhat grieving, Meg has to deal with her new reality, one without Major, and one where she’s not sure she’ll ever jump again. Sure horses are nice and grand and all that, and sure her Jump coach who owns the stables offers her a stupendous horse to ride, star of the stable… but Meg ain’t feeling it. Jumping? Really? Without Major? Possibly never again.
So when she stumbles across an email regarding her and the chance to go to a Bed and Breakfast and work there for the summer, she digs in her heels and declares she SHALL go (Mom is entirely against it, wants her back jumping as the family has spent oodles of bucks on her lessons, on stabling Major, etc. etc.). There’s some foot stamping that I found hiiiiiighly unattractive for our young heroine, but then I recalled that she’s only 16-years old when this opens, and naturally her relationship with her Mom is tetchy and fraught. Still, Dad thinks Meg can handle it, and so his word, which he pronounces only about 2% of the time, is the final one on the matter.
On the quaint island, with the quaint Bed and Breakfast, with the quaint owners, Meg starts discovering that she’s capable of quite a bit really. And as she gets to know the incredibly HOT Jared, things start looking interesting. When she helps out at a ranch, she’s given a mare: She haaaates mares. And it’s an Appaloosa: She’s entirely leeeeery of Appaloosas. When feisty Salem breaks out of Jared’s barn and sends them on a wild goose chase, Meg is pretty much sure she was correct about the whole mare, Appaloosa thing. Imagine how surprised she is to find herself feeling relief and joy to find Salem and to get her back to the barn with relatively little trouble.
Not much happens in this book. This is just a story of a young girl healing, her rather intense relationship with her mother taking on a new form as she grows older, and a slow development of a relationship between Jared and herself. Robins takes her time with the relationship which was a complete and utter relief. I mean, it starts with Meg imMEDiately noticing just how fine-looking Jared is atop his tractor, so I was thinking Yikes! and Oh noooo! But the two get to know each other, working side by side, in a leisurely and far more satisfying manner than a Wham! and Done!
Plus Jared has his own ghosts and things to deal with, and p’raps that’s the one place I kinda got stuck in. Cuz you see, Meg is only 16, tho’ she does indeed turn 17 during the story. She seems to come off with an endless amount of patience and maturity to handle taking on his demons and navigating a new relationship with a somewhat older… young man… And add to this the fact that when Meg talks to her mother it’s all: I ALMOST stomped my feet up the stairs, and having urges to behave like a whiny child. So the maturity as juxtaposed against the foot-stompy-ness was odd and kinda made the former not as believable as it might have been sans hissy fits.
Cody Sterna does a fair job with the narration, but she does indeed have the voice of a younger teen. This was jim-dandy fine as Meg begins finding herself capable of much, and as she advises and coaches another young girl on jumping and showing. But when it comes to the steamier and more hormonal spots? Oh good golly gosh: Meg getting all hot and bothered cuz they’re aboooout to have that First Kiss? That First Kiss leading her to wanna wrap her legs around Jared and be carried off somewhere? Well, uhm… like, noooo…! Still, Sterna’s voice for Jared is believable if not swoon-worthy, and well, gosh: She just carried off the story and made it sweet.
And so we come to the major test: Would I wanna listen to the second in this, what is a series. Gotta tell ya? I would, and I looked, and while the full series is available in paperback and Kindle? Nary a sequel to be found as an audiobook. Alas, and oh well. This’ll have to do for now.
Charming little ditty, and the quoted “An Amazon Reviewer”s were quite correct. This is a sweet little story, not gupped up with all sorts of Teen Angst and Uber-Drama.
I tell ya: It’s AWEsome meeting Life with a Low Bar!!!
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