Saddle Sore

Saddle Club #66

by Bonnie Bryant

The girls of the Saddle Club--Stevie Lake, Carole Hanson, and Lisa Atwood--and their friend Emily have headed West to the Bar None Dude Ranch. Emily has cerebral palsy. She's helping the ranch's owner make it accessible to riders with special needs. At the ranch, they meet a girl their own age--a former rider who has lost part of her leg in a motorbike accident. She doesn't plan to get on a horse ever again. In the meantime, the Saddle Club and Emily are riding so much, they're saddle sore! Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?

Genres: Horses, Childrens, Young Adult, Middle Grade

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 1997

About the author

American author of children's books. She is best known for creating the intermediate horse book series The Saddle Club, which was published from October 1988 until April 2001. The Saddle Club chronicled the adventures of thirteen-year-old Lisa Atwood and twelve-year-olds Stephanie "Stevie" Lake and Carole Hanson. The series was static in time; the girls never aged in 101 books, 7 special editions, and 3 Inside Stories.

Bonnie Bryant also wrote two spin-off series: Pony Tails, aimed at beginning readers, and Pine Hollow, aimed at teenage readers. The 16 Pony Tails books followed the lives of eight-year-olds May Grover, Corey Takamura, and Jasmine James. Pine Hollow featured Carole, Lisa, Stevie, and their new friends in a series set four years after The Saddle Club. Unlike The Saddle Club, Pine Hollow conformed to a realistic timeline. The 17 books took place over the span of less than a year. Later a television show called The Saddle Club, based on the books, was filmed in Australia.

Bonnie Bryant wrote at least 38 The Saddle Club books and 2 Pine Hollow books herself; after that they were taken over by a team of ghostwriters, a common practice in long-running children's book series. Ghostwriters for the Saddle Club and Pine Hollow books included Caitlin Macy (sometimes credited as Caitlin C. Macy), Catherine Hapka, Sallie Bissell, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Helen Geraghty, Tina deVaron, Cat Johnston, Minna Jung, and Sheila Prescott-Vessey.

Bonnie Bryant is also the author of many novelizations of movies, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Karate Kid, and Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, written under her married name, B.B. Hiller. She also collaborated in the ghostwriting of The Baby-sitters Club Super Special #14: BSC in the USA, published under the name of its creator, Ann M. Martin.

Bonnie Bryant was born and raised in New York City. She met her husband, Neil W. Hiller, in college, where they both worked on the campus newspaper. They had two sons, Emmons Hiller and Andrew Hiller. Neil Hiller died in 1989. Many of Bonnie's books are dedicated to him.
***from wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Alexis Rivera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brings me back to my childhood when all I basically read were horse books 😂

[Claire Binkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know it might not be appropriate for my age range anymore, but I was REALLY, REALLY into ALL THE books in not only this series but maybe five other appropriately-aged series when I was about the age of the girl on the cover, maybe a few years younger. I remember very clearly how I had a model of a horse with its skeleton and intestines to put together and a little stable with maybe sixty little plastic toys which I loved to play with for all the hours I wasn't dedicating to oboe. I don't have any of them anymore, but I still have their approximate memories.

This book describes the starts of the hippo therapy that I started to get into when things started to fall apart.

[Lex]

Blatant Very Special Episode, with the Important Message in neon lights and underlined seven times, but I still loved this book when I was a kid.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was also just after I stopped rabidly collecting this series, and thus new to be. But it was actually pretty adorable, and I still love the characters an awful lot. The Lesson Learned was a little bit beats-you-over-the-head still, but I give this a lot of points for actually doing a reasonable job with regards to ablism, and the treatment of disabled characters (of whom there were more than one, even!) in this particular story. Caveat: I am AB and therefore could well be missing things; I apologise if so. But it was a marked step up both from what I remember of the genre and what I'd expect.

[Rika · Rating 3 out of 5]

acknowledge me to horses