Hilarious Horse Novel Titles

We’re back in Joanna Campbell’s wonderful world of thoroughbred horse racing, this time, Thoroughbred [Vollblut] series edition. If you want to find out more about the series and have a laugh at the spin-off prequel series’ titles, go check out Part 1 here. If you read it, you already know that sometimes titles in this series might fool even the most experienced horse novel reader by being totally ambiguous. We had the example of Ashleigh’s Promise where Promise does not refer to a promise but to a horse by that name. In the Thoroughbred series, however, we have several different types of ambiguity. So, let’s play a little game. In the following, there’s always one title out of place. It’s basically a guessing game since you won’t be able to determine the true meaning without reading the blurb or being already familiar with the series …

Joanna Campbell’s world of thoroughbred racing is one of my horse novel favourites. Both the Ashleigh [Aileen] as well as the Thoroughbred [Vollblut] series (and its specials) have a special place in my heart. They’re the reason I started working on my English skills: I was way to curious to wait till the German publisher translated the books, I just had to know what was going to happen. There was a great fan page back in the days with profiles of the horses, characters, authors and tonnes and tonnes of trivia (since the books were later on written by a rotating panel of authors, the mistakes, character transformations, et al. were numerous). I spent hours translating it all. I also became so mesmerised by the world of American thoroughbred racing that I wrote my A-level research paper on the Sport of the Kings. So far, I read all 15 Ashleigh novels, 1 of the 4 special editions and 38 of the 72 Thoroughbred novels, although I own considerably more …

The first book I remember reading myself and actually enjoying was a horse novel I got for Christmas when I was 8 years old. Up until then, I had loved books and other people reading them to me, but I had hated reading myself. After said book, I couldn’t stop anymore. In recent years, my horse novel addiction had gone unnoticed. The only people who knew about it were a couple of Internet friends I haven’t been much in touch with and like-minded people on the PonyClub book club board. I was content and left in blissful peace. Then, I started to make new friends on Goodreads, which was also just fine – until I went on Twitter. Gone were the peaceful days in my horse novel paradise, replaced by constant mobbing and my silent tears …