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. Casey has always dreamed of competing at the Badminton Horse Trials: will the One Dollar Horse be able to take her there? 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. But then everything changes when she and her father save a horse from certain destruction. 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, 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.Ĭasey 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. 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. 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. The One Dollar Horse is like a classic and a modern fairytale all wrapped up in one.
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