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King's Oak
Anne Rivers Siddons

Statistics:
Copyright 1990
623 pages
ISBN: 0060162481
Historical/General Fiction

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Horse connection:
Main character's daughter finds healing with riding lessons

Description:
Andy moves to a horsey Old South town to escape an abusive marriage with her 10 year old daughter, Hilary. Hilary is drawn to all animals, but especially the horses. Andy is pleased by the healing she sees in her daughter, but also worries about her being consumed by the horsey set. The horses are only a small bit of background in the novel.

Accuracy:
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painfully inaccurate   [login to vote]   detailed and exquisitely accurate

2.00 Rating, 2 Votes

Quantity:
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minimal or background   [login to vote]   horsey

2.00 Rating, 2 Votes

Quality:
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waste of time   [login to vote]   worth a worldwide search

2.50 Rating, 2 Votes

Ratings Key

Like a bad joke, by bbroyles on April 21, 2006

Some ok horse info, but mostly awkwardly confused. You have to love the "dressage habit" as the Christmas gift for the ten year old girl who's been riding a few months and jumps barriers at the big dressage rally but decides to quit when she can't handle the brutal slaying of foxes at hunts. Eventually the bad horse references do trail off (the horses just sort of disappear from the book, so maybe Siddons realized she was going nowhere and cut her losses), but the last hundred or so pages, even without horses, will leave you scratching your head and asking WHY, oh WHY it was ever written. The first couple hundred pages, maybe even the first 300, had some potential... Overall, it does not portray the horse community in a good light.

Not horsey, but still good, by ponydom on June 13, 2004

I picked up this book because it had a rather nice painting of a dressage horse on the cover. However, the cover is a little misleading for the amount of Horse in the book - the King's Oak tree and surrounding woods get a lot more screen time in the text. The wee bit of horse content that is there sounds like it was written by someone who knows horses.

It's a good book anyway - literate and pleasant to read. She does a great job of describing the woods on the Big Silver - as I read it I felt I could melt into the woods along with the characters. Our heroine is shrill and annoying at times, but deliberately so, and overall it works to see Andy mature into a person who is eventually more comfortable in her own skin.