My girls LOVE this series. "Rusty" is Amber's favorite of the entire series. Frosty has a foal and Heather (the main character) learns to care for the baby. Heather also learns to jump with the help of Rusty, a seasoned show jumper. There's a nice lesson about working together in this book. ( )

I had a friend in high school who loved horses and by loved I mean LOVED HORSES. They were all over her room and last I heard she was working with a Veterinarian so I guess it worked out. As soon as I heard I was receiving this book to review I thought of her and wished we had stayed in better touch so I could pass this book on to her.

Rusty: The High-Flying Morgan Horse (Morgan Horse Series) is the third book in Ellen F. Feld's Morgan Horse Series. A cute book, well written which made it easy to get into the characters. I think a bit of it was lost on me because I don't know that much about horses and don't share my friend's LOVE of them. I think any child that is into horses boy or girl would like reading this series. These books could be the fuel that takes a spark that is a love for horses and turns it into a lifelong passion to own, preserve and care for horses in adulthood.

I received this book through the Librarything Member Giveaway Program. I was the epitome of a horse-crazy girl while growing up, I've always made habit of reading every horse story I lay hands on, and I was so excited to discover this Morgan Horse Series. I love how this series delves into the traits of a specific breed of riding horse, but my favorite thing about it is that each book focuses on a different riding discipline. It seems like nearly all of the horse stories I read growing up dealt with horse racing, Western riding, or show jumping. I really, really loved the idea of a series showing off all sorts of riding disciplines.

Rusty, however, didn't wow me. While the book was really cute, I found it lightweight and too inconstant for my taste. Even though I loved how multiple riding disciplines were referenced in the story, the heroine Heather Richardson bothered me. Her age was never given, and I kept sliding my guess of how old she is with every new scene I read. Her best friend is a college student? Okay, maybe she’s 16. Her parents drive her around? Okay, maybe 14. She isn’t interested in talking about boys yet? Okay, 12. It takes her an appallingly long time to figure out that she did not, in fact, train her friend’s championship jumper to jump, even after her friend gently points this out to her? 10 years old, tops.

Heather is written as a character with tremendous riding ability, but she shows incredible ignorance when it comes to a lot of general horse information. She does learn a lot in the course of this book, but it’s all such passive learning. She doesn’t spend much time asking questions, which makes me think she’s a dumb as dirt, and she takes no formal riding lessons at all, which makes it very hard for me to accept her as an expert rider at such an early age – described as such in the text as, “[Rusty’s] talented rider, with her smooth seat and responsive hands, blended perfectly with the animal.” (p. 46).

All of the new things she learns about training and caring for horses are directly because someone else observed her making a mistake and corrected her on it. I had a very hard time sympathizing with Heather after the birth of her mare’s new foal because with all of Heather’s excitement leading up to the birth, none of it spilled over into learning anything about foals. With all the preparation leading up to the birth of her very first foal, Heather never once thought about possible names for it? Even with the stable’s owner being an experienced breeder and Heather’s “mentor” and “second father” to boot, she never asked him to explain a typical birthing scenario? Or asked how she ought to go about training the new foal?

It's even more aggravating because Heather does make smart choices at times – she just quickly follows them up with foolish ones. My pleasure at reading this story really waned at trying to correlate Heather’s two strongest character traits: that of a girl with such little initiative in learning, and that of a girl to whom “…the fiery, stylish actions of saddleseat brought a new passion, and she soon developed a fabulous ability to bring out the best in a horse trained in that discipline.” (p. 53)

And I wonder why basic horse terminology like ‘sire’ and ‘dam’ were defined so clumsily in this book. Rusty is the third book in this series, and the series setting is a breeding farm. Wouldn’t terms like this have come up before? And if it’s just a matter of the author preferring to define certain equestrian terms within the text of each book, I wonder why other terms that may be unfamiliar to young readers, like ‘girth’, were not also defined. I was also puzzled over the inclusion of nonstandard spellings for other equestrian terms: the preferred spelling of ‘saddleseat’ is saddle seat, according to the United States Equestrian Federation, the governing body for the sport; and this is the first story I’ve seen where English riding is consistently written as ‘english riding.’

I don’t think any of these issues would bother younger readers, though, and this book would be very appropriate for early readers (maybe nine- or ten-year-olds). I’d be cautious at giving it to children who have already read a lot of other horsey books, because the basic things so patiently explained in Rusty are likely to bore more widely-read children.

Additional information about the Morgan Horse Series, and the real horses on which the stories are in part based, is available online at the Willow Bend Publishing website.

Quotes pulled from ISBN 0970900244. ( )