Girls and their Horsesby Eliza Jane Brazier
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: June 6, 2023
Genre: fiction
Pages: 400
ReRead?: No
Project: great American road trip
Set in the glamorous, competitive world of showjumping, a novel about the girls who ride, their cutthroat mothers, and a suspicious death at a horse show
When the nouveau riche Parker family moves to an exclusive community in the heart of Southern California, they believe it’s their chance at a fresh start. Heather Parker is determined to give her daughters the life she never had—starting with horses.
She signs them up for riding lessons at Rancho Santa Fe Equestrian, where horses are a lifestyle. Heather becomes a “Barn Mom,” part of a group of wealthy women who hang at the stables, drink wine, and prepare their daughters for competition.
It’s not long before the Parker family is fully enmeshed in the horse world—from mean girl cliques to barn romance and dark secrets. With the end of summer horse show fast approaching, the pressure is on, and these mothers will stop at nothing to give their daughters everything they deserve.
Before the summer is over, lies will turn lethal, accidents will happen, and someone will end up dead.
I decided to start my road trip in California because there is no better start to the Great American Road Trip than California, unless it’s New York, and I decided on California.
I ran across this book because I have been mainlining a podcast with Anne Bogel called What Should I Read Next. She also runs an internet “book club” called the Modern Mrs. Darcy book club, which is reading this book for May. It’s $15 a month to join, but I decided to go ahead and pay for a month to figure out if it is worth my time, which is where I ran across this book.
I’m not sure if I loved it or hated it, but I read it in one day.
It’s definitely a modern thriller mystery. Told from the perspective of various characters, we start after the murder, but spend about 2 pages there and then go backwards, to four months before. And the author does not fill the reader in on the identity of the victim. Until about 95%.
I spent most of the book periodically looking up and asking my dog “WHO THE FUCK IS DEAD.”
I thought I had an inkling at about 70%, but turns out I was wrong. And because this is a modern thriller, all of the characters suck. Like, I hated them all. Maybe I liked one. No more than two. Probably only one.
I will say that my daughter was a horse girl, and she competed at the 4H horse fair, but her experience in a barn in Oregon was worlds away from the cutthroat world and million dollar horses of this book. Thank god, because these people had more money than sense. Or character. But I was thoroughly engaged, and I was wrong about the ending, and that’s satisfying.