Life is really too short to read books this damn dumb. When I pulled this book from my shelf and read the back cover I couldn’t remember why the hell I’d bought this book back in 2009. I’m guessing I’d just finished the author’s Water for Elephants and liked it enough to give another of her books a shot. Also, horses are involved and I’m a sucker for anything horse-related. Well, the horsey descriptions cannot make up for awkward writing, a moronic and odious heroine, and clunky romantic elements. Sara Gruen’s Riding Lessons is the story of Annemarie Zimmer who was once an Olympic contender in equestrian sports, but, after a horrific riding accident at eighteen, refused to ever ride again. Now she is a 38 year old woman who has moved back home to New Hampshire and her parents’ horse farm in order to put her shattered life back together. That’s the concise summary of the book. What happens is, all on the same day, Annemarie (aka Dipshit) is laid off from her job, her husband tells her he’s leaving her for a younger woman, she discovers her daughter is in danger of being expelled from school, and her mother calls her to tell her that her father is dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), a particularly horrible disease that gradually paralyzes the body but leaves the mind active and aware. As a reader I think, “Whoa. That’s a lot of crap to hit a person all on one day.” But okay, I’ll put aside my doubts and keep reading. How is our intrepid heroine going to deal with all this? In one word: badly.First, she packs up her surly teenage daughter Eva and moves them from Minneapolis to New Hampshire. Ostensibly this is to help around the house and see her father, but she’s so horrified by his deteriorating condition that she avoids him and can barely stand to be around him. Okay, I can understand that this is difficult, but wow. Annemarie, you are officially a Dipshit and an asshole. Next, she walks in on her daughter in the bathtub and, after spending a certain amount of time creepily observing her daughter’s “impossibly firm” breasts and “perfect, taut skin,” she sees above one of her breasts a tattoo of a unicorn “with a radius of approximately one inch” and freaks the fuck out (62). She attempts to yank Eva from the tub, causing the girl to fall backwards into the tub, screams at her that she is a stupid little girl and storms from the room to look up plastic surgeons to have this teeny tiny unicorn blasted from her daughter’s perfect body. Uh, who’s the child here? Damn woman, calm down. It’s a tiny tattoo of a unicorn for crying out loud. Within twenty minutes (seriously, that’s directly from the book), Dipshit storms downstairs, shouting for Eva to come here right this second because they have an appointment in half an hour to see a plastic surgeon. Um, okay, more eye-rolling on my part. Really? You have an appointment with a plastic surgeon today in 30 minutes? C’mon. You’re in New Hampshire, not freaking Los Angeles. And where the hell is this plastic surgeon who can see you in 30 minutes? Does New Hampshire have an office conveniently located nearby solely dedicated to seeing melodramatic psycho idiotic mothers? Luckily, Papa sees this and he consoles his stupid daughter, telling her that if she forces Eva to remove the tattoo, she’ll probably be resentful and do something even more rebellious. Gee, ya think? Dipshit is astonished by this amazing insight and never hauls Eva to the plastic surgeon. From what I can see, Eva is not a bad kid. It seems that she is just acting like a teenager—excited about something and talkative one day, surly and sullen the next. That’s being a teenager. That’s what they do. They also sometimes do things they know will piss off their parents and the parents should be wise enough to know this and be flexible enough to deal with it without freaking out. Dipshit is not this parent. Who knows about Roger, her missing husband, but Dipshit seems to have been an absent parent and even when she spent time with her daughter, she didn’t seem to enjoy the experience all that much. All parents screw up and make mistakes, but Dipshit is too much of a child herself to deal maturely with Eva. This book has a lot of problems, but the poorly constructed characters is the biggest. I think Gruen meant for readers to have sympathy for Dipshit and to show how Dipshit is courageous and can face the overwhelming challenges life has thrown at her. However, Gruen has piled on way too many challenges for Dipshit and Dipshit is not facing them. I can understand Dipshit being unfocused and thrown off balance by her loss of a job and her husband leaving her AND her father’s ALS, but c’mon. She doesn’t deal with any of it. She avoids her lawyer’s emails and phone calls even though she’s the one who initiated divorce proceedings…and she still has thoughts such as, “oh, I’m sure Roger and I can work it out and get back together.” Um, then why do you avoid his phone calls and emails? Why did you file for divorce? Supposedly she wants to help her father, but she is horrified by him and can’t face him so she avoids him. She picks fights with her mother (“Mutti,” apparently German for mother/mom? “Pappa” and “Mutti” are names that both annoy me. I guess it just seems childish) about stupid stuff because she’s an immature brat. When she tells Mutti she wants to help run the stables, Mutti tells her no because she doesn’t have the training and it’s more complicated than she thinks. Dipshit gets offended by this and responds with a smart ass comment, “It’s not rocket science!” Cue the dramatic music: Dipshit fucks up managing the stables. I’m not sure when she started managing the stables; from what the author has shown me of Mutti, she wouldn’t have allowed it. But suddenly Dipshit is managing and Mutti is shuffled off-stage to take care of her husband. This doesn’t make any sense because they have a male nurse who is there now almost 24/7 to help with Pappa and he zips around in a wheelchair so…what’s Mutti doing? Oh, yeah, the author needed to have Dipshit take over the stable management so she can show how demanding it is and add more difficulty to this woman’s life. I’m guessing that magically (with the help of a good man, there are two candidates waiting to be interviewed) she’ll see she need to focus and bam! she’ll become an amazing stable manager. Overnight. I guess because I will not make it that far. This woman is not a believable character. She was raised with horses, loves horses, raised her daughter to love horses and ride, and yet she mismanages her parents’ business and doesn’t seem to care if the horses have feed or shavings. When she is reminded for the umpteenth time by one of the stable hands that he’s almost out of hay and shavings and has she ordered them yet?, she’s horrified (only two days’ supply left?!) and promises to call, but instead decides, oh yeah, now’s a great time to read the divorce settlement I’ve been avoiding for weeks. It’s just so blatantly stupid. I mean, let’s avoid discussing the fact that a stable like that (with thirty or so horses) would probably have hay and straw delivered automatically on a schedule so as to avoid the necessity of calling every month or so to place an order (not to mention if they’ve settled on a fee and have paid for a year’s supply in advance they would avoid the price fluctuations), why the hell would she procrastinate on that? Usually people procrastinate on stuff they have a reason to avoid. I can see her avoiding Roger’s phone calls, avoiding dealing with the reality of her failed marriage by dodging her lawyer, but this is a simple order for vital supplies. It’s very, very bad plot construction by the author. When the author has to contort the characters or the plot to make dumb things happen so that something else happens to further the plot and I can see the bones of the plot so clearly it’s as if I’ve written the plot outline myself, I’m annoyed. I don’t want to see the steel frame of the story—I just want the story. If I can pick apart the story while I’m reading it, it’s bad writing. Here’s the perfect example of what I mean:Now that Dipshit has suddenly and with no warning assumed management of her parent’s horse farm (this includes stabling the horses, exercising the horses, employing stable hands and a trainer who gives riding lessons), she is under more stress. Her daughter, who has been around horses since she was a child and knows them very well, began volunteering with the local veterinarian (who also happens to be Dipshit’s high school hottie sweetie) to care for rescued horses. One day, when Dipshit is dealing with a demanding client (whose complaint could have been easily dealt with and smoothed over), the hottie vet drives back with her daughter and it’s clear there’s a problem. Dipshit, instead of professionally and politely telling Demanding Client that she has a family emergency and she’ll be right back, yells at the woman to shut up, thus pissing her off. So what was the big deal? Oh, yeah, Hottie caught Eva smoking in the barn. Anyone who works around horses or livestock in general knows this is a bad idea (for readers who don’t know: large quantities of stored hay and staw + burning matches/cigarettes = fire) and I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but really? Eva now suddenly is a smoker? And she’s smoking around the rescued foals she’s been so happy to take care of? I don’t believe it. This is the poorly constructed plot device—Gruen wants to put the stables in a dire financial situation. How to do this? Well, cause an important client to leave suddenly. Why does the important client leave suddenly? Because Dipshit is unprofessional with the important client. How does that happen? Insert artificial plot device—Eva, who loves horses and has been around stables her whole life, suddenly decides to smoke in a barn. This is bad writing. Why not just let it happen organically? From what I can see of Dipshit and how poorly she is handling everything in her life, it wouldn’t surprise anyone (except maybe Dipshit) if clients left due to her pisspoor management of the stables. But the author apparently needed the stables to be financially insecure right now (for some other aspect of the plot to fall in place—I won’t know because I’ve stopped reading this crappy novel) so she had to artificially force it. I call a foul on you, Gruen. The other big plot of the book is the new horse she buys from Hottie. He rescued the horse because it looks a lot like Harry, the horse who died in her bad riding accident twenty or so years ago. She suspects the horse is Harry’s brother, even though that horse supposedly died in a gruesome fire. She’s obsessed with this to the point of looking like a nutjob. It’s also kinda like…is this important? I mean, in the grand scheme of your life right now, is discovering the true identity of this horse so important? Because I’m pretty sure Dipshit is going to come out smelling like roses by the end of this book, she’s probably right and something dishonest and evil went down with the horse’s previous owner. But no fear, she’ll fix the farm, divorce her cheating husband, make her daughter her new BFF, and marry one of the hotties (the other is the French pony-tailed trainer Jean-Claude. Yes, that really is his name: insert giggles here). As for the horsey aspect of this craptastic novel, Gruen gets a better review. I love horses. Love, love, love. I’ve never gotten over my girly crush on them and I’ve taking riding lessons (English style, no less) and I’ve volunteered at a rescue farm that took in took in all sorts of animals, not just horses. So much of her descriptions of the stables and the rescued horses does ring true to me—I’ve helped take care of horses that were neglected and abused and it’s horrible to see and heart-rending sad and makes me so angry I’d like to do to the owners what they did to their animals, so I get that part of the book. And when Dipshit says that she loves the smell of horses, I get that too. Horses have the best smell in the world. There’s nothing like working with horses. If I could manage it financially, I’d quit my idiot job and spend all day mucking out stalls for free and consider myself lucky. So, that’s the only part of the novel that strikes me as honest—Gruen’s descriptions of the horses and the stables and the feel of a horse and the intense and unreasonable love for horses. But other novels do it better, so I’d rather re-read Molly Gloss’s The Hearts of Horses or Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion series. Those are better books.
Goddamn, my flaky connection just ate my entire review :|So, to sum up. Flawless, flawless writing. Flawless characterizations. But the main character.....just as patently unlikable and abrasive on the last page as she was in the beginning. There was character development, but she's just....so, so unlikable. The ending was really too good for what she had earned. She had earned a bittersweet ending, but wound up getting everything handed to her on a platter. Not satisfying at all.I would love to move on to the second book to continue reading about the secondary characters. But unfortunately, Annemarie is the main character in that one as well, and I just can't get myself to care enough about her to read an entire second book from her POV again.I'll definitely be picking up Gruen's other book, the one about the elephant, though. From the reviews, those characters are more likable, and Gruen really is an exquisite and brutally real writer. And I'll be hoping that she won't be writing many more books in this Annemarie series, because the sooner she quits messing with Annemarie, the sooner she'll move on to other writing projects, with, hopefully more likable main characters.Edit: I want to add, that this book was good. Really good. It gripped me. I stayed up until 5am trying to finish it before I finally collapsed. And I did like to a point, and sometimes even connected with, Annemarie. But geez, enough is enough. I think the author was going for a Bridget Jones sort of character, a lovable walking disaster, but she missed the mark by a long shot. Annemarie is a walking disaster, no doubt, but she really has no redeeming qualities, and there's nothing really likable about her, let alone lovable. What the romantic interest sees in her, I don't know.
What do You think about Riding Lessons (2007)?
probably would've rated less if i wasn't such a sucker for all the horse prose. of which there wasn't even ask that much. Annemarie's constant overwroughtness makes her a less than ideal narrator and makes it difficult for a reader to really absorb/process each of the problems she's got going on (kid, horse, divorce, new relationship, dying parent, failing family business, identity crisis, the whole book with the exception of her scenes with her mother feels like someone running around with their hair on fire). the plot is pretty formulaic, and for all the text she spends waxing rhapsodic about the horse(s) we get very little actual action / interaction with the animals themselves. i know, not every book about horses has to be all about the horses, but it would've been interesting to see a little more of Annemarie's relationship with the horses and a little less frantic shouting.it's good to see that Gruen refined her skill with Water For Elephants, where you get a much clearer dense of just how well she can write human-animal relationships as well as human-human, not to mention a much less stilted plot flow. still glad i didn't read this one first.
—Stephanie
Pretty close to making this a "DNF".I picked it up because I loved the author's book "Like Water For Elephants"but this book is not bringing me that same level of enjoyment. I am not certain if it is the book or the person reading it, but I dislike both the main character Annemarie and her Daughter, Eva. Both seem to be in perpetual states of anger - shrieky anger. Some of that may be the person reading who, the actress is just driving me up a wall. Everything is overdramatic. Annemarie and her daughter seem pretty one dimension. I just want to shake Annemarie and say "No wonder your husband ditched you and your daughter divorced you. You're immature and whiny." She reacts with anger to everything, everything, her daughter does. You'd think by the time her daughter reached 15 Annemarie would have developed a little more patience. The male lead could use a bit more personality and backbone. Annemarie dumped him 20 years ago to marry her bad boy boyfriend. She's divorced so he takes her back no questinos asked, no apologies made. Boy these people are annoying. Mutti (the grandmother), I like. The horses I like. The rest of these people - ACK!
—Elizabeth
So it was hard for me to like the main character, Annemarie Zimmer. Even a little bit. She’s self-centered, socially inept, and she flies off the handle at the slightest provocation. She’s a walking nightmare, and yet she’s not a complete lost cause. She does try, however miserably, and she always ends up failing, but there’s something to be said for effort, right?There is something to be said for the tragic character, and in many respects that’s exactly what Annemarie is. And if it hadn’t been for Sara Gruen’s deft hand, RIDING LESSONS might have been lacking. In fact, I might have turned away completely.But I didn’t. My fingers pressed against my Kindle, as I turned page after electronic page, and I began to realize that Annemarie—at least to a certain extent—was 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 that’s 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.Cross-posted at Robert's Reads
—Robert
