tiger_moran | I'd write my own review but I can't put 'honestly fuck this book' in an amazon review

Heh, I finally found 2 negative reviews for Caroline Akrill's Courses for Horses pointing out many of the same issues that I had with it (like the email address bullshit for one), amongst a sea of gushing 5 star reviews of it. I hated it and was genuinely really upset about how much I hated it, because this is a series which left off somewhere in the 1990s both in the books and reality. This was a series I first read and loved as a child so I mean... to have the author finally bring out a final book in the series after all this time but then it really felt like she'd forgotten about anything and everything that made the series charming originally, it was really heartbreaking. She didn't seem to know when the hell it was meant to be set so it does not feel remotely like the 1990s when it should be set, it feels totally modern and you get shit like references to email addresses. Plus the humour was gone and the likeable eccentricity of the original series was mostly lacking and when it was there it felt... overdone and stupid now. Not to mention her bringing in a boring unlikeable character who had barely appeared in the series before and having him totally take over everything basically, what they do with their stables, what happens to Elaine's horse, being paired off with one of the women, while almost completely writing out an actually interesting male character. Then there's the tedious pairing off of all the female characters, the silly cowboy character who added absolutely nothing except to inexplicably namedrop Monty Roberts and get paired off with the other female character, the stupid posh massive equestrian centre that is so way way out of character for these characters, or that we're supposed to buy that Elaine sells her supposedly beloved horse who she's terrified of getting hurt or killed to someone who treats him like a commodity, then that she doesn't bother to ask who is actually buying him or who he's going to, doesn't bother to find out where he's going to live, or anything, or the also really silly thing with the ponies and them being given all these thousands of pounds worth of stuff (again! They'd already had the other horses and stuff just left with them) or the stupid Badminton plotline where the new rider magically wins of course despite only just having taken the horse on and just been in a car crash (I fucking cried at this scene I swear because it's just like... why am I supposed to care about this when you've just ripped all this away from Elaine and acted like she and we the readers are supposed to be fine with that? I was so so upset by this because it basically just shit on something from my childhood I loved a lot and just spoilt the entire series, I wish she'd never written another one honestly). Then there's the depressing ending where it's acknowledged that everything has changed which sorry didn't magically become not depressing just because she finally brought the far more interesting male character in for about three sentences and Elaine's (except he's not hers any more though) horse is about to come back but of course only as a livery and she'll now never have any say in what happens to him.

There is literally like... one minor detail in it I liked (that the black horse is finally given a name). Everything else was just... awful, and went totally against everything that had gone before in that series and everything that made it endearing to me despite it largely featuring two things I hate (hunting and eventing). But so many of the comments about it are genuinely just gushing over how amazing it is and how well it finished off the series and I'm thinking what the fuck story are you reading that you think it's so amazing and well written and satisfactory?