Standalone

I noticed pretty early on that I liked the concepts: inherent darkness taking strange and sometimes perilous shapes by miracles that have to be overcome, a radio station on wheels that holds the key to so many lives, the complicated relationships between the characters, the desert setting. However, I also realised I wasn’t sure whether I would come to like the book. In the end, I didn’t. In fact, it bored me so much I was very close to giving up on it …

Wow, this was a wild ride. I feel like I only understood about 10% of what I read. Still, I enjoyed reading this collection a lot – at least in the beginning. The last couple of stories unfortunately didn’t connect with me quite as well as some of the previous. But the writing is very beautiful, incredibly intricate and complex and there’s more happening between the lines then what’s on the page …

World War II is a piece of history that interests me a lot. I have watched numerous documentaries and like finding out more about stuff that went down back then. Being from Germany, my point of view courtesy of history lessons in school, documentaries, and the media has mostly been German-centric, so I really like taking on different points of view and exploring what happened in other countries. This book is one of those that provide insight into something I had never heard of thus far: I had no idea that Russia was the only country that allowed women to fly and become fighter pilots in the war. And what an incredible story they shared!

I can’t take this novel seriously. I’m sorry, I just can’t. Seeing all my friends raving about The Scorpio Races makes me laugh out loud. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad novel, not at all. I enjoyed it immensely and had a lot of fun with it, some of it unintentional. Because it is, and there’s no way to sugar-coat it, a horse novel to a T. It’s so cliché, it can’t get any more cliché …

Jenny Hughes is one of the PonyClub regulars. I really adore her older books but I’m not really into her newer novels, although there has been an exception. This one, unfortunately, was the weakest of her books I read so far …

I’ve read about 600 horse novels so far, but except for the novelisation of Hidalgo (I love that film!) and a Mustang Mountain volume I more or less consider western riding, this is the first proper novel about endurance I ever read – at least as far as I remember. It’s a shame, really, because this makes for a rather interesting and hardly touched upon topic. I liked it so much I even gave the novel another star …

Weird. That’s the first word that comes to my mind when thinking about this novel. Technically, it had all the elements of my favourite chick lit novels: family mysteries, history, and foreign cultures. And yet, the pieces were oddly intertwined, the parts not evenly distributed over the course of the novel instead appearing as lengthy chunks one after the other. Furthermore, as much as I’m inclined to believe in some kind of the supernatural, as much as I love fantasy and madness borderlining each other, this story was something I just couldn’t fathom …