Pony Confidential

In this madcap, comic mystery, an old pony sets out to find and exact revenge on his former owner, a woman extradited for a 25-year-old murder.

Christina Lynch departs from historical fiction themed on love and espionage (Sally Brady’s Italian Adventure, The Italian Party) and trots out an inventively clever comic mystery, Pony Confidential. 

 

A dual storyline threads the narrative that starts when Californian, Penny Marcus, an unassuming third-grade teacher, is arrested. Penny is charged for a murder committed 25-years before, when she was 12-years-old and living in New York. Stunned, Penny is considered a “wanted fugitive.” She’s separated from her estranged husband and mentally ill daughter and extradited to her old hometown.

 

Decades before, Penny’s sensitive, loyal riding pony--who accompanied her on the day of the murder--incurred a “primal wound” when he was sold. Cast adrift from home to home, the willful, mindful pony suffered from simmering resentment: “You make us believe we’re beloved family members (I’m looking at you, Penny!) and then you put a dollar sign on our heads and send us off with anyone who coughs up the cash.” Now aging, cynical, and fed up with his lot in life, the jaded pony escapes his current owner. He sets off on a cross-country adventure, enlisting the help of other whimsical, talking animals to find and exact revenge on Penny. En route, however, new details emerge into the cold case that put Penny behind bars.

 

Lynch wrangles up a searingly fun, imaginative story that shines with plausible, madcap plotting and keen, edgy observations about the nature of people and animal welfare.

Pony Confidential by Christina Lynch 

Berkley, $28.00 hardcover, 9780593640364, 384 pages

Publication Date: November 5, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (November 29, 2024), link HERE 

The Year of the Horses

An honest, resolute memoir that details how a writer suffering an existential crisis found healing and salvation in her passion for horses.

Novelist and writing guru Courtney Maum takes readers on a candid, deeply moving journey that details how she found her way out of a labyrinth of depression by rekindling her passion for horses. 

By her 35th birthday, Maum (Before and After the Book Deal; Costalegre) was a successful novelist, working on her second book. She was at her happiest--a beloved wife and doting mother of a beautiful baby girl, Nina. She and her equally creative filmmaker husband had moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., into a fixer-upper house they bought in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. But when Nina turned two, something indefinable manifested in Maum--an existential crisis. Maum was deluged with roiling feelings that stalled her writing, plagued her with insomnia and provoked a general feeling of emotional malaise. A non-life-threatening car crash sustained with her husband and daughter "was a match to the depression" that would all-out engulf her. However, the accident proved a necessary jolt that sent Maum on a journey to reassess her life and decipher what might bring her a sense of peace and joy, and restore her equilibrium.

In therapy, Maum mined her past, recognizing how she missed her affinity and fascination for horses, starting when she was a child with a pony, boarded in a barn near her family's Greenwich, Conn., home. Maum's journey of healing and salvation in reconnecting to equine culture is wittily engaging and uncompromisingly forthright. She confronts the past, while also braiding in delightful flourishes regarding the metaphorical meanings of horses and the universal role they have played throughout history and in the arts.

 The Year of the Horses: A Memoir by Courtney Maum

Tin House Books, $27.95 hardcover, 9781953534156, 416 pages

Publication Date: April 19, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (May 3, 2022), link HERE

 

To read the longer form of this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (March 22, 2022), link HERE