Sara Gruen
Riding Lessons
HarperTorch, New York, 2004, 387 pp.
Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2007.
Annemarie Zimmer’s Olympic dreams when her horse injures her in an accident: he
is
destroyed. She give up riding and horses entirely. Twenty years later, she returns
to her family’s
horse farm, divorced, and with a troubled teenage daughter, Eve. Annemarie’s
mother is fighting
hard to keep the farm going, and her father is stricken with Lou
Gehrig’s disease. There is a
horse there, who looks worthless, but he reminds Annemarie
of her old horse Harry. She has to
struggle to heal herself and the horse, and come
to term’s with her father’s affliction.
Sara Gruen is a Canadian, who moved to the United States in 1999 when she got a technical writing job. When she was made redundant, she decided to write fiction. Her first two novels, Riding Lessons and Flying Changes were both about horses, and are both still in print. Her next novel, Water for Elephants, was about Jacob, a young man who had very nearly qualified as a vet when his parents were killed, leaving him without the funds to complete his training. He found a job with a circus, and as the only character with any sort of moral compass, had a very hard time. Sara Gruen’s latest book, Ape House, is about bonobos.
She lives with her family and animals in an environmental community north of Chicago.
Finding the book: both the books are still in print, and easy to find in both the UK and USA.
Links and sources:
Sara Gruen’s website
An interview with Sara Gruen
Wikipedia on Sara Gruen
Bibliography -
Flying Changes
HarperTorch, New York, 2005, 371 pp.
Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2007.
Annemarie is anxious about everything: that her relationship is stagnating; that
her daughter Eva’s
equestrian dreams will carry her away. Maple Brook horse farm
is changing, and Annemarie has
to confront her fears, but it is a tragedy no one anticipates
which allows the family to finally ride
free.
