Review: Flying Changes

Title:  Flying Changes

Author:  Sara Gruen

Published:  April 3, 2007

# of Pages:  400

ISBN:  978-0061241093

My Rating:  2.5/5

Flying Changes is the sequel to Riding Lessons (here’s my review) so be forewarned that this review will contain plot spoilers for the first book.

Ok, so Flying Changes begins about a year after Riding Lessons ends.  Annemarie and Dan are still together, living in peace and harmony – except that Annemarie wants to get married, and Dan doesn’t seem to have any interest in that, and also Dan spends the majority of his time driving around the country, rescuing horses from auctions, so they don’t see each other too often.  Eva has fallen completely in love with riding, and Annemarie really doesn’t know how to handle it – she wants her daughter to be happy but is terrified that she’ll suffer the same fate Annemarie dealt with after she was thrown from her horse so many years ago.  When Eva is caught doing questionable activities at school, expelled, and subsequently offered a position in a prestigious riding school, Annemarie knows it’s the best possible thing for Eva, but can’t imagine letting her go.  If she sends her to the school, Eva will have all kinds of new opportunities and experiences, and if she doesn’t, she’ll simply be a kid without a high school to attend and plenty of trouble just waiting for her to find… even though the answer is obvious, even to Annemarie, she still can’t help her fears – and these fears even start to threaten her relationship with her daughter.

Flying Changes wasn’t NEARLY as good as Riding Lessons.  Let me just start by making that very clear.  While the characters still had the same believable personalities and relationships between one another, the plot was the total opposite of believable.  Everything that happened just seemed so… I don’t know… not possible.  Too many coincidences, too many things that went exactly perfectly, and everything ended up being tied up in WAY too neat a bow for my tastes.  I would not recommend this book as a stand-alone novel.  If you enjoyed Riding Lessons and are interested in seeing what happens to the characters, then I do think the book is worth your time.  Mainly because personally, I enjoyed catching up with them to see how things turned out.  But I’d say that overall, this is Gruen’s weakest book and I can only recommend it if you REALLY care about the characters in the first novel.  Otherwise, it’s simply not that great of a read.

Another opinion -

• Amanda at Great Books and Fresh Coffee

Review: Riding Lessons

Riding Lessons – Sara Gruen

From the back cover -

As a world-class equestrian and Olympic contender, Annemarie Zimmer lived for the thrill of a flight atop a strong, graceful animal.  Then, at eighteen, a tragic accident destroyed her riding career and Harry, the beautiful horse she cherished.

Now, twenty years later, Annemarie is coming home to her dying father’s New Hampshire horse farm.  Jobless and abandoned, she is bringing her troubled teenage daughter to this place of pain and memory, where ghosts of an unresolved youth still haunts the fields and stables – and where hope lives in the eyes of the handsome, veterinarian Annemarie loved as a girl… and in the seductive allure of a trainer with a magic touch.

But everything will change yet again with one glimpse of a white striped gelding startlingly similar to the one Annemarie lost in another lifetime.  And an obsession is born that could shatter her fragile world.

My thoughts -

Sara Gruen has a fabulous talent… she just does.  I loved Water for Elephants and I loved this book too.  She has a way with her characters; she writes very complex and interesting people, that you just naturally care about as you read about them.  Her stories are definitely page-turners, in fact I truthfully couldn’t put this book down and abandoned the other books I am currently reading to finish it.

I do not normally read books about horses as I am not a horse person, however I am an animal lover and since I knew that I enjoyed Gruen’s other book, I figured what the heck and borrowed it from the library.  I’m SO glad that I did because this book was about much, much more than horses.  It is about a woman haunted by the potential she gave up on and her parents’ unrealistic expectations for her life, about a teenage girl who doesn’t know how lost she is until she finally fits somewhere unexpected, about a mother and daughter trying to reconcile after years of bitterness and resentment, and about a woman realizing, after 20 years of marriage, that things aren’t always what they seem when it comes to intimate relationships.  All this… PLUS a story about animals!

I was annoyed by one thing, however… I thought that Annemarie was WAY too harsh with her daughter and not at all understanding of what the fifteen-year-old was going through.  Generally, Annemarie was quite self-absorbed and that bothered me.  I think, though, that Gruen meant to write her that way, and based on what she was going through it’s understandable that she acted the way she did throughout most of the book.  I can’t say I wasn’t irritated with her behavior sometimes, but I like that she was a very realistic character.

Riding Lessons is a fabulous book and I will definitely be reading more from Ms. Gruen in the future!

Also reviewed by Julie at Girls Just Reading.

Review – Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

From Amazon.com -

Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the “menagerie” and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and… he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August’s wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there’s trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the “revenooers” or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena’s and Rosie’s pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it–and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.

My thoughts -

Hands down, one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  I was utterly captivated by this story, by Jacob’s story, by the amazing animals, especially Rosie the elephant, the crazy Uncle Al and the even crazier August, and the enchanting Marlena.  This is obviously a story about a circus in the midst of the Depression, but it’s more a story of a young man’s coming into his own, a young woman scraping for her independence, and the absolute and total love and loyalty an animal can show for a human being, and vice versa.  Parts of this book were difficult for me to take in, I have a VERY difficult time reading about animal cruelty, and Gruen spared nothing in her descriptions of how some of these animals were treated.  But at the same time, those descriptions were important to the story because they made the whole thing that much more realistic.  Of course I know nothing about circuis life, or the 1930’s, but I truly felt like Jacob was a real person, narrating his real memoir of his life as a young man. 

And the ending… man, what an ending.  This novel tied up so neatly I almost couldn’t believe it… but it was so beautiful that I could, because I wanted so badly for things to turn out right.  I strongly recommend reading this book, it will captivate you as it did me, you will fly through it, and you will be glad you met Jacob and heard his story, because it is such an amazing one.

10 big, bright yellow stars.

Read Trish’s review here, Julie’s review here, Jeane’s review here, Care’s review here, Kristen’s review here, Natasha’s review here, Di’s review here, and Jaimie’s review here.