April 1, 2010
Gr 3-6-Charlotte Richards, 13, lives on a cattle ranch in the Australian outback. When she gets a chance to try out for the Junior Olympic Equestrian Squad, she is ecstatic, but she soon finds that she has a hard time fitting in with her snobbish, privileged classmates at the Thornton Downs riding academy. Things become even more complicated when she is paired with a horse with attitude. Leila is an equine movie star, and she is accustomed to the Hollywood lifestyle: her own private trailer, pedicures and spas, lavish parties, Prada feedbags, and Ferragamo horseshoes. But Leila has a big secretshe can talk, thanks to hours of watching television when she was a foal. When two inept horsenappers lure her away with pepperoni pizza, Leila is accidentally sold and shipped to Australia, ending up at the riding academy. Desperate to return to California, she reveals her secret to Charlotte, and wacky hijinks ensue in the first book and its sequel, in which Leila is sold to a carnival by the penny-pinching nephew of the head of the riding academy and then becomes involved with illegal loggers in the wilderness. These books are good, silly fun, and a number of the scenes set in the outback are genuinely interesting, but the mean-girl antics are fairly predictable, and Leila is so anthropomorphized (a horse that eats cheeseburgers, wears mascara, and can do splits during dance routines?) that the stories may not appeal to fans of more realistic horse fiction."Kathleen E. Gruver, Burlington County Library, Westampton, NJ"
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