Saddle Club – The Inside Story: Carole

Bonnie Bryant's The Inside Story: Carole is a Saddle Club story for 9 year olds, told through the pages of Carole's own riding journal.

What happens

Carole Hanson has just had an e-mail from Cam. He's decided he wants to be a three-day event rider when he grows up. He's also read that the best riders knew what they wanted by the age of seven.

So where does that leave Carole? She knows she wants to work with horses. She just has no idea how. An instructor like Max? A vet? A trainer, a breeder, a competitive rider?

She decides to sort it out on her own, without Stevie and Lisa. Her first idea is to dig out every riding journal she's ever kept and look for clues. In the box she finds the diary from the year her family moved to Willow Creek, and she's not sure she wants to open it.

Meanwhile something is very odd about Max. He's sneezing, losing his train of thought mid-lesson and being unusually patient with a newspaper reporter who can't saddle a horse. The Saddle Club decide what he really needs is a wife. The Fourth of July picnic is coming up, so they invite every single woman they can think of (thirteen of them, and Max has no idea).

Reading it really is like reading someone's private notebook. Carole wanders off topic, catches herself and says so, which feels very real. E-mails from Stevie and Lisa are taped in too, so you hear their voices as well. Stevie's ideas for the picnic games include a watermelon stomp and painting the horses as zebras. Lisa's reply is exactly as sensible as you'd expect.

The old diary pages are a treat for anyone who already knows these girls. Carole arrives at Pine Hollow for the first time, rides a sweet old grey called Pepper and thinks Stevie could stand to be a bit more serious about riding!

If you've got a horse-mad reader who is starting to wonder what they'll be when they grow up, Carole's muddle will feel very familiar. It's gentle, chatty and full of stable life.

What to read next

If they'd like the other side of the story, Lisa keeps her own diary in The Inside Story: Lisa. She starts it after reading a magazine article about people who keep journals, and Stevie is teasing her about it in the very first entry.