Author: Tudor Robins
Year of publication: 2014
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Meg Traherne has never known loss. Until the beautiful, talented horse she trained herself, drops dead underneath her in the show ring.
Jared Strickland has been living with loss ever since his father died in a tragic farming accident.
Meg escapes from her grief by changing everything about her life; moving away from home to spend her summer living on an island in the St. Lawrence River, scrubbing toilets and waiting on guests at a B&B.
Once there, she meets Jared; doing his best to keep anything else in his life from changing.
When Jared offers Meg a scruffy appaloosa mare out of a friend’s back field, it’s the beginning of a journey that will change both of them by the end of the summer.
Review: **Copy kindly provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review**
Appaloosa Summer delivers a light, charming, read that is suitable for both Middle-Grade and YA readers. The horse-training and casual running of a B&B was on point, and the atmosphere of the story was beautiful. Tudor Robins clearly has extensive knowledge of both subjects, as well as the Wolfe Island/Kingston area.
I liked the main character, Meg, a lot. She was somewhat sparky, and her journey through her grief was believable, and definitely not rushed through and forgotten about. She felt like a real teenage girl living on her own for the first time, even if it was only for the summer. Her relationships with the other characters were palpable, and reading through her life was an enjoyable experience.
I enjoyed Jared’s character too. It was great having a love interest in the story who did not solely exist to add romance to the novel. His grief and story felt real, too, and I identified with his fear of leaving the island. As someone who suffers from anxiety, it was great to find it in another character without it taking over the whole novel.
I would have enjoyed having more of Slate in the story. I felt like we didn’t really know her that well although she interacted with Meg via text through a lot of the novel, but my personal head-canon due to the last couple of chapters is that she is totally queer (or at least that Lacey is), and as a queer person myself, I would have enjoyed potential confirmation of the fact.
I only really have minimal complaints about this story. One would be the lack of action in the story, another would be how that at points the characters felt very two dimensional, and the last would be how the timing of the story really wasn’t clear. At the beginning, I thought the story was taking place at the end of a summer, but instead it was the opposite.
As this is apparently book one in a series, I would expect for the action to pick up substantially in the next in order to keep the pages turning, and perhaps a little more drama as Appaloosa Summer was virtually free of it. Overall though, it was a worthwhile read, solid enough to make me want to read book two whenever it comes out, and earn itself three stars.
Rating: 3/5 stars
★★★✰✰
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