Dusty always jokes when life gets to be not funny at all. But the night before the vet comes to put down ailing Tazz, her thoroughbred, all Dusty feels is pain. Pain in her heart, and pain in her spine--injured in a drunk-driving accident after her mother's sudden death. The drunk at the wheel was her own grieving father, and now, though he is sober, Dusty's back is in a brace and, like Tazz, she hurts all the time. Sometime before dawn, an eerily beautiful stranger appears in the barn doorway and offers to take Tazz away with him. Away where? Dusty wonders, but Tazz trusts the boy. Dusty's beloved horse seems healed, willing to leap right over the sun, to run, fly, and so she lets him go.
Dusty doesn't think much about it when she learns at school that a student named Skye Ryder was accidentally killed on his dirt bike. But she finds out where he was killed (on her father's property) and how (by a cable strung across the trail). Then Dusty sees a picture of Skye in the newspaper (very much resembling her horse's otherworldly new owner). And her father begins drinking again. It isn't long before Skye returns. Part angel, part vengeful ghost, he will never know peace unless Dusty can help him seek the justice he deserves, even if it means alienating the only person Dusty has left.
Grade 5-8-Dusty Grove has had two difficult years: her mother died unexpectedly, her back was permanently injured during an accident that occurred when her father was driving drunk, and now her beloved horse, Tazz, must be put down because of incurable pain in his hooves. So when a glimmering stranger cures Tazz and rides him away, Dusty is glad-until she discovers that her visitor is the angry ghost of a teenaged boy recently killed on her father's property. Springer deftly unfolds each detail of this contemporary supernatural mystery. Her expert pacing and her protagonist's funny, sarcastic voice save the novel from its overwrought story line. The result is an enjoyable, quick read that will hold special appeal for fans of TV's Touched by an Angel. Beth Wright, Dorothy Alling Memorial Library, Williston, VT Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Springer deftly unfolds each detail of this contemporary supernatural mystery...an enjoyable, quick read." -- -- School Library Journal--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist." I have a rubber stamp declaring those words, and they pretty much delineate my life. Conforming was the thing to do when I was raised, in the fifties. Even my mother, who spent her days painting animal portraits at an easel in the corner of the kitchen, tried to conform via housecleaning, bridge parties, and a new outfit every spring. My father, who was born into a British-mannered Protestant family in southern Ireland, emigrated to America as a young man and idolized the "melting pot" because at last he fit in. Once in a rare while he recited "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" or told a tale of a leprechaun, but most of the time he was an earnest naturalized American who expected exemplary behavior of his children. My mother was a charming Pollyanna who would not entertain negative sentiments in herself or anyone around her. As their only girl and the baby of the family, I was coddled, yet hardly ever got a chance to be other than excruciatingly good.
My "conform" phase lasted right into adulthood. When I was thirteen, my parents bought a small motel near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and I spent most of my teen years helping them make beds and clean rooms. I did not date until I went to college -- Gettysburg College, all of seven miles from home. it was the height of the sixties, and I grew my hair long, but eschewed pot, protests, and "happenings." Instead, I married a preacher's son who was himself conforming by studying for the ministry. Within a few years I was Rev. Springer's wife, complete with offspringers, living in a country parsonage in southern York County, PA.
Here beginneth the "go crazy" phase.
Because I had never been allowed any negative emotions, I began to hear "voices" in my head. First they whispered "divorce" (not permissible), and later they hissed "suicide". They scared me silly. I couldn't sleep; images of knives and torture floated in front of my eyes even during the daytime; something roared like an animal inside my ears; my wrists hurt; I saw blood seeping out of the walls; panic jolted me like a cattle goad out of nowhere. Is it necessary to add that I was clinically depressed? The doctor gave me Valium and sent me to a shrink. The shrink took me off the Valium and told me I had a problem with anger. (No duh.) The next doctor zombied me on the numbing antidepressants which were available at that time. The next shrink said I had an adjustment problem. And so on, for several years, during which I somehow managed to stay alive, take care of my kids, handle the vagaries of my husband, sew clothing and grow vegetables to get by financially, cook, can preserves, show up at church, do mounds of laundry and publish "The White Hart" and "The Silver Sun"--yet not one of the doctors of shrinks ever suggested that I might be a strong person, let alone a writer. All of them were intent on "helping" poor little me "adjust" to being a housewife, mother, and pastor's wife.
Eventually I became resigned to the fact (as I perceived it) that I was an evil, sinful person with horrible things going on inside my head, and I stopped trying to fix me. I stopped going to doctors or therapists. Somehow I found courage--or desperation--to stop trying to conform or adjust or live a role.
"I am going to start taking an hour or two first thing in the morning to do my writing," I said to my husband.
"Fine," he said. He had reached the point where he would agree with whatever to humor the neurotic wife; to him it was just another of my brain farts. But to me it was the most important sentence I ever spoke. With that statement I stopped being a housewife who sometimes stole time to write, and I started being a writer.
Conform, go crazy--or become an artist.
By becoming a writer--by becoming who I truly was--I became well.
It was so simple. Although it did take years, of course; it takes a long time for good things to grow. Trees. Books. Me. Odd thing about books; they not only nourish growth but show it happening. In "The Black Beast, The Golden Swan" and many other of my early novels, you can see me dealing with the yang/yin nature of good and evil, struggling to accept my own shadow. In "Chains of Gold" and "The Hex Witch of Seldom" I start writing as a woman, no longer identifying only with male main characters. In a number of children's books I come to terms with my own childhood. And in "Apocalypse"--whoa, what a fierce, dark fantasy novel, the first thing I wrote after my income from writing enabled my husband to leave the ministry. I hadn't thought of myself as repressed when I was a pastor's wife, but obviously something broke loose when I shed that role. "Larque on the Wing"--whoa again, another breakthrough book that spiraled straight out of my muddled middle-aged psyche and took me places I'd never dreamed were in me.
It's been a long time since those days when I thought I was an evil person. I know better now, and I love and trust me even to the extent of writing "Fair Peril"--a more perilous novel than I knew at the time, interfacing all too closely with my life. Written two years before the fact, it foresees my husband's infidelity and my divorce. The most painful irony I've ever faced is that once I gained my selfhood, I lost my lifelong partner. He had supported me through episodes that would have sent most men screaming and running, but once I became well and strong, he transferred his loyalty to a skinny, neurotic waif all to similar to the young woman I once was. After supporting him through twenty-seven years of stinky socks, automotive yearnings, miscellaneous foibles, and the career change that put him where she could cry on his shoulder, I found this a bit hard to take. But I wouldn't go back to being Ms. Pitiful. Not for anything.
Now married to a rather remarkable second husband, after living 46 years in Pennsylvania I moved in 2007 to the Florida panhandle, where I spent a year living in a small apartment above the aforementioned husband's hangar in an exceedingly rural (swamps, egrets, snakes and alligators) airport. Now we have a real house about a mile from the airport on higher ground featuring tremendously tall longleaf pine trees with rattlesnakes and scorpions underneath them. Life is an adventure and I mean that sincerely.
This is a fantastic book! I reccomend it to everyone! It's not just about horses. Actually, it's not really about horses that much. Yet it is still a very great book! I love it, and I am glad that I own it. I know I will read it time and time again. It has a great plot, with twists, interesting characters, and a wonderful ending. This is a moving book- it touched me. I don't even know how, but I know it touched me. I hope you will read it and enjoy it as much as I did. :)
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Dusty's life for the past couple of years has been pretty bad. First her mom died suddenly, of a brain aneurism. Her father, unable to deal with the pain, started drinking heavily. He was driving drunk with Dusty in the car when they had an accident that left Dusty's spine permanently damaged. She lives in constant pain and will never be able to ride horses, her passion, again.
When her favorite horse, Tazz, becomes so sick he will have to be put down, it is almost more than Dusty can bear. The night before the vet comes for Tazz, though, a strange boy appears at the barn and rides him away. Dusty suspects the boy may be a ghost, the spirit of Skye Ryder, a boy from her school who died on her property while riding his dirt bike.
Skye is no friendly ghost, though. He is filled with rage over his death and sworn to revenge against the person who may have caused it by stringing a cable across the path. Dusty wants to help Skye find peace, but what price will she pay to do it?
I liked that Dusty's father has some major flaws, which makes him seem more human and real, and which makes Dusty a stronger character who has to take care of herself. Skye's character is an interesting one; he is a good blend of rage and compassion. However, Dusty seemed to grow attached to him far too quickly. She said she loved him, but she never really even knew him.
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Sky Rider is a ghost who takes a young girl named dusty's horse. Dusty gives the horse to the magnificent young boy with a white glow around not knowing that he is a ghost who ony a few hours ago was killed on her property by her father who is an alcoholic. Dusty has to keep Sky from killing her father but also help him cross over and get his wings.
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