Spirit Horse of the Rockies

Susan M. Nardinger

That's setting you off, isn't it? A book called Spirit Horse of the Rockies published by "Spirit Horse Enterprises?" The self-publishing bell is going off in your head. As well it should be. This book is a prime example of the reason I look askance at self-published books. First off-- the cover is horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. Might possibly have been okay for a children's book (and actually i found it in the children's section of the book sale), but even then I'd question the professionalism of the drawings. For an adult book... absolutely wrong, all the way around.

As for the book itself, aside from desperately needing a grammar editor (and a good spellcheck on occasion), instead of focusing on the life of Spokane, the 1889 Kentucky Derby winner and the only one foaled in Montana, the book takes a more holistic approach to its subject, intertwining Spokane's career with the events going on in the greater world around him. Which is all well and good, except that there's never enough time taken with those events to make them in any way meaningful in the context of the story.

Nardinger also (and this is probably more a pet peeve of mone than anything else) does something that a number of handicapping book authors do that absolutely drives me up the wall-- since the Daily Racing Form and other such publications only list the last name, and possibly first initial, of a given horse's human connections, those human connections are duly reported in many cases as just last names, or first initials and last names. Obviously some research went into this, and given that the events here take place, for the most part, five years before the founding of the DRF, I'm willing to give Nardinger moere leeway than current handicapping authors (whose use of this convention shows that they know little, if anything, of the circuits they're covering). But if you can't dig up the first name, why put in the name at all? It's kind of hard to connect in any meaningful way with a last name. We get acquainted with Pike Barnes, a kind of hard-luck jockey who rode in almost every one of Spokane's major races-- on a different horse each time, because he kept getting dumped by trainers. Okay, that's amusing. We have a full name, and a general diea of the guy, and he becomes a part of the story. But the others, last names only, who get referred to once? Do we need them? No.

Overall, it could have used a good editor. This has the air of a book that was rejected by many before being self-published; perhaps the author should have taken the time to question why it was being rejected by others before publishing it herself. * 1/2