Review: Natalie Keller Reinert - Ambition
Natalie Keller Reinert’s
heroines are tricky to like, at least at first. The heroine of Ambition, Jules, has come up the hard
way. She was the horse-mad girl without the horse, who earned rides and
teaching through slog. “I was child labor and I was proud of it,” she says. All
she wanted to do was ride. The barn where she worked was for the children of
the rich, who soon worked out Jules’ position in the scheme of things: right at
the bottom. And they let her know it, “accidentally” spilling shampoo in the
troughs she was filling; dropping tack they knew she had to clean in the mud.
Because she was just the help, and they could get away with it. It was enough
to sour anyone, and Jules is sour.
She’s determined she’ll succeed
on her own, and if sheer, hard, passionate graft could do it, she’d be in the
Olympic team already. But as we find out, it’s not enough. Graft, even when
allied to talent, isn’t enough to win you the scholarship you need in order to
keep your stable afloat. It’s not enough to work out the problems that beset
the marvellous new horse you think will be the one to get you up to advanced
level. It’s not enough to make you work out the difficult relationship you have
with your working student.
However brilliant Jules is with
horses, she is blindingly hopeless with people. She’s one of those who, because
they’ve been hurt so much in the past, bites first and asks questions later. She
treads, wilfully, all over anyone who dares to come near her. You sympathise
with Becky, the working pupil. Jules can’t understand why Becky seems to have
gone off her, but we can. Oh, we can.
Despite Jules’ desperate, tearing
ambition to get somewhere, she seems intent on sabotaging herself. She simply
can’t believe that anyone can approach her simply because they like her, and
not because they have some sort of ulterior motive. The dreadful irony is that
Jules spends her life sorting out problem horses, but she’s the least sorted
out person in Florida.
The brilliance of Natalie Keller
Reinert is that she makes you stick with this difficult, prickly, downright
unlikeable girl. And if you, like me, do need to find at least something to
like in a main character, stick with this book. I promise you you will not
regret it.
The turning point for Jules is a brilliantly written disaster. Here in the UK we are not prone to tornados or storms which flatten everything in their path. That’s what hits Jules’ stables. I read the description of this with eyes open wide. It is by turns riveting and petrifying. But it’s when Jules has lost everything apart from her horses, and when she has no option but to accept help, that things start to change for her, and her horses.
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Thanks to Natalie Keller Reinert for sending me a copy of this book.
Natalie Keller Reinert: Ambition
Kindle: £3.06, Kobo £2.87, Nook $4.99
Age range: for adults
Themes: ambition, eventing, mild romance
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