The Glory by Lauren St John

I may be well past the age for which horse stories are aimed, but that hasn’t stopped me from them loving them, and when it comes to contemporary horse stories, Lauren St John is the best. This was demonstrated in her wonderful One Dollar Horse trilogy and now cemented with her new book, The Glory.

‘The Glory’ is an invented race (unlike the Event trials our One Dollar Horse hero Casey Blue competes in) - a mammoth, long distance race across America, the like of which no longer exists today. The Glory is endurance riding taken to the edge, a ‘do or die’ experience not to be undertaken lightly, whatever temptation the $250,000 prize might ignite.

Will has to win – his father needs life-saving surgery and without the money there’s no way they’ll be able to pay for it. He’s spent the last of his savings to get here and told his father he’s gotten a job on a ranch. Alex has been sent to the states by her mother and step-father to a boarding school/prison camp for troubled teens, 'Camp Renew', following a series of mistakes and her parents' blinkered inability to try and understand their daughter properly. The school is just a few miles from the The Glory's start point, and after running away at the earliest possible chance, stealing/rescuing a horse in the process, Alex, moneyless and otherwise directionless, talks the organizers into giving her a wild card entrance.

Can these two teenagers beat the odds, survive everything the wilderness has to throw at them, and achieve their dreams? Several dastardly villains are on their tail – cheating competitors, horse thieves, and Camp Renew’s warden/headmaster Strike Cartwright among them. I hope it’s not giving too much away to tell you that they each get their comeuppance in the end – some in quite the comedy of errors – but the real worry is, how much damage will they cause along the way?

Alternating between the two protagonists, The Glory comes together with Lauren St John’s usual wit, panache and clever storytelling. The quiet relationship that gradually develops between the two characters has just a touch of engineering – as does the fairytale ending of the story – yet also feels entirely right and true and exactly the way the world should be. There is danger a-plenty, but a good number of laughs too, and St John deftly interweaves little snippets of American history into the narrative that give the story a lovely extra little touch.

The Glory is pure escapism, but its escapism at it's absolute best. I loved it.

Race the Wind, by Lauren St John

Race the Wind is Lauren St John’s second book following the story of Casey Blue and her horse, Storm, and begins exactly where The One Dollar Horse left off. It is the morning after Casey’s dramatic Badminton Horse Trials, but all is not well in the house. If Casey thought life was going to be easy and full of roses after defeating all the odds stacked against her in One Dollar Horse, she was wrong. Just when it seems St John couldn’t throw anything else or anything new at Casey, guess what? She does.

Hands down to St John for writing a book in Race the Wind that does pretty much exactly the same thing as The One Dollar Horse does, and yet is as equally enjoyable and satisfying. This time, Casey’s father’s criminal past has come back to haunt her. Or not so much his criminal past, but the implication of a criminal present, and this time it’s even worse: he’s been arrested for murder. He’s adamant that he’s innocent, and Casey believes him, but will it get in the way of her friendships? And what can she do to prove his innocence? Nothing, it would seem. At first, anyway. Surely he has to have been set up. But why? And by whom?

To add to Casey’s worries, not only does a creepy guy seem to be following her, but Storm is acting up and seems to have reverted to his wild self, refusing to let her near him. And then things crystallise: blackmail is on the cards. Those responsible for her father’s detention want Casey to win the next big championship, the Kentucky Horse Trials. Can she do it? And even if she can, should she acquiesce to their demands?

Race the Wind is fast-paced and contains everything that made The One Dollar Horse a bestseller: tension, moral questions, friendships to be made and frayed, dreams to be fought for. Covering just a period of weeks, as opposed to the two years that passed in book one, it’s a shorter book that reaches its conclusions and finds its footing faster than its precursor. It’s no less satisfying, though, and I can’t wait to see what trials and tribulations will be thrown Casey’s way in the promised third book. Presumably St John will take us to The Burghley Horse Trials, the third event in the Eventing Grand Slam - although I wouldn’t put it past her to change the game...

The Obituary Writer, by Lauren St John

Lauren St John is a big, big name in children’s publishing, with her African Adventures series, The Laura Marlin Mysteries, and most recent bestseller, The One Dollar Horse. Now, though, she has set her sights on the adult world: The Obituary Writer is her first published work of adult fiction. It is both lyrical and dark, wild and tame, and sure to be a success.

The premise: London journalist Nick is living a happy-shallow city life as an obituary writer for The Times, but when his commuter train crashes, his life buckles and smashes like the carriages and people around him. It is one of the worst crashes in British history, but Nick somehow walks away. There is PTSD   and survivor’s guilt, but he is seemingly otherwise unhurt - except for the living nightmares that soon begin to plague him. These are dark and creepy and bleed into his waking hours, his day job, his personal life. What does it mean? How can he escape them?

A book written in two parts, the first half sucks you into Nick’s mind and sets a tidy pace as he tries to swaddle himself away from the world and his dreams. It’s creepy and dark and intriguing, and impossible to imagine where it’s going to go. Part two of The Obituary Writer, though, is quite a different beast. Forced by a confluence of events to flee London, Nick seeks solace in Cornwall. His mind is set on a particular course of action, but at the last possible moment it is changed by the vision of a woman, barefoot, on horseback, galloping across the sands of Porthcurno beach. St John’s description of the Cornish air and countryside is so vivid that it’s little surprise Nick’s encounter sets him in a new direction – reading it was enough to make me want to jump out of bed (at midnight, no less) and go and bury my own toes in the sand.

As Nick settles into a new life in Cornwall, at first it seems as if he has left London's demons behind him, but they are only biding their time, soon to raise their ugly heads in ways that are new and just as confusing for our protagonist. It is a constant struggle to find the delicate balance between normal life and his internal fears. The storyline is not as smooth-running and shiney as in St John’s writing for children and here and there just a little convoluted – clearly she knew where she wanted to get Nick to by the end of the book, but the process of getting there is at times not as sharp as in her other writing. Woven into this journey, though, are tremours of darkness, hints at Nick’s confusion over his past and his present. Events float out and around him almost as in a fog, and you know that something, something is going to happen to bring it all to a head, but what? Each time St John puts another rock in his path, you start to wonder, is this how it will end, is this what it means, but then he navigates around it, until, until… the letter.

Nick is both likeable and unlikeable; he has plenty of flaws, but he means well. He has a big ginger cat, Oliver, who is a character in the story all on his own, adding extra life to Nick and his troubles. The thing is that Nick means well, but even when things start to work out for him, part of him left behind by the accident remains shut off. It’s almost as if he knows what is going to happen, what it all means, but like many of his demons, he doesn’t much like having to confront them. Just like most people. I like that St John leaves the ending ever so slightly open – I can take away what I think happened, what I think was written in that letter, but I do wonder, does anybody ever find it? What does it say?

Overall, The Obituary Writer, like Nick’s dreams, casts a shadow of mottled degrees, like clouds on a sunny day: dark in places, lighter in others, with different textures in between. It is hot and cold, a story with an overcast, and a sign that Lauren St John is here to stay.

The One Dollar Horse, by Lauren St John

The One Dollar Horse is like a classic and a modern fairytale all wrapped up in one. It has that feel-good essence you get from really good chick-lit or from a younger children’s book like The Secret Garden or Ballet Shoes, but without the overly smoochy tendencies of the first or the old fashioned societal set-up of the second. I’m a girly girl in that I like stories with horses or ballet or happy-ever-after endings, so this was bound to be a win-win book for me, and with it’s hot-pink pages it’s definitely being aimed at the girly market. But, that said, I truly believe this is a book to be enjoyed by even those who wouldn’t normally pick up a horse book, and that is because, really, the horse story is just a side-line to the classic character arc, the ups and downs of pursuing your dreams, no matter what those dreams happen to be.

Casey Blue does not have the most auspicious of backgrounds, but living in a tower block in East London with her just-out-of-jail father doesn’t mean she can’t dream any bigger than the rest of us. Horse mad, she volunteers at the local riding centre and figures if she’s lucky she’ll train to be a riding instructor there one day. But then everything changes when she and her father save a horse from certain destruction. Downbeaten and starving, will the horse even survive his first night in the stable? I don’t think I’d be giving too much away by saying yes, and that he turns out to be rather a gem. Casey has always dreamed of competing at the Badminton Horse Trials: will the One Dollar Horse be able to take her there?

Lauren St John’s story covers an unusually long time period for an older children/teen novel as Casey slowly trains herself and her horse, begins competing, struggles, pauses, picks herself up and starts again. At least two years have passed by the time we reach the conclusion, a time period that other reviewers have argued is unrealistic in terms of horse training. But, really, that doesn’t matter. This is not a book you start reading in the knowledge that its story-arc is going to be entirely reflective of real life, and this fairytale aspect is what lends itself to the feel of modern classics like Ballet Shoes, and that One Dollar Horse emulates perfectly. It’s a story not about what it takes to train a horse for Badminton, but about following your dreams, believing in yourself, overcoming struggles, and seeing things through to their conclusion. It is, in short, a dream come true. The adults among us know full well that this is not the sort of thing that happens every day - and the people around Casey are apt to remind her of this fact too - but sometimes it does, and we all secretly hope that we’ll be the ones who get to experience it.

Casey’s struggles are topical and, mostly, realistic - money, social typecasting - and the fairytale storytelling is further affirmed by the presence of a fairy godmother-type character who comes to the rescue in moments of direst need. Although officially classed as a teenage title by Waterstones, the content is such that it is perfectly suited for younger children as well, perhaps from the age of nine or ten if they are strong readers - comments from a mum in my shop suggest that some of the themes (eg. Casey’s father’s criminal activities and their implications) may need explaining to younger readers, but that otherwise her eight-year-old enjoyed it and is looking forward to the next installment, Race the Wind, out in April. To this end, there was a particular storyline that wasn’t tied up at the end of One Dollar Horse, which I hope will be picked up again in the sequel. Something tells me that Badminton is not the end of the road for Casey, and I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next.

I must say how nice it is that there are still new stories like this one being written, that the traditions of authors like Noel Streatfeild and Eva Ibbotson are still alive and kicking. And also how nice it is that a book of this ilk is being aimed at teenagers, a genre so often swamped with dark romance and the assumption that the only thing teenage girls want to read are soppy love stories. Don’t get me wrong, soppy love stories definitely have their place, but there is so much more to life. In many aspects this book is a love story, but it’s not all about the boy and who’s kissing who; rather, its focus is on finding the positives in life and fighting for your place on the ladder instead of letting others decide it for you. If you enjoy it, try some of Lauren St John's other books, or Maggie Stiefvater's excellent The Scorpio Races.