The Horse Whisperer (Penguin Readers, Level 3) - Softcover

Evans

3.85

58,553 ratings by Goodreads

9780582416376: The Horse Whisperer (Penguin Readers, Level 3)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 058241637X ISBN 13: 9780582416376

Publisher: Pearson ESL, 2000

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Thirteen-year-old Grace and her horse, Pilgrim, are involved in a horrific accident. Grace's mother, Annie, believes that they can both be helped by Tom Booker, a (R)horse whispererA(c). They drive to meet him and there, in the beautiful mountains of Montana, their lives are changed for ever. The Horse Whisperer has been a number one best-seller throughout the world. Now it is also a major film starring Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas.

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Review:

The Horse Whisperer is a story made in Hollywood heaven. The novel was written by a first-time author, and the film option was snapped up by aging heartthrob Robert Redford for 3 million smackers. Why take such risks on a brand-spanking-new author? The answer becomes clear upon reading the touching tale.

One morning while teenage Grace Maclean is riding Pilgrim, her goofy, loveable pony, she has a horrendous glass-shattering, bone-splintering, ligament-lynching meeting with a megaton truck that leaves her and her four-legged friend damaged in mind, body, and spirit. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, her jaded, brilliant, bitchy mom, Annie Graves (Kristin Scott Thomas in the 1998 film) is working out a wrinkle in her self-absorbed existence when she gets a call at her plush, Manhattan office about Grace's accident. Racked with guilt, Graves makes it her calling to find the mythical horse whisperer, an equine Zen master who has the ability to heal horses (and broken souls) with soothing words and a gentle touch. Just when it seems he can't be found, what do you know, she finds him. He arrives in the form of Tom Booker-- a rugged, sensitive, dreamy cowboy who helps Pilgrim and Grace repair their fractured selves. To add more mesquite to fire, Booker has a way with not-so-injured, attractive, married women--like Annie. As the plot thickens, so does the familial strife, which threatens to undo Booker's healing work.

Like an expert cinematographer, Evans deftly crafts each scene with precision and clarity, sprinkling in ominous signs and foreboding images. For example, in the opening paragraphs, as Annie starts out on the tragic ride, she comes across a bloody bird wing that seems to have fallen out of nowhere. The weight of impending doom is further strengthened by the truck driver's bad luck--he has a run-in with the highway patrol just moments before his meeting with Grace and Pilgrim. These not-so-subtle subliminal messages are masterfully stitched in throughout the story and may compel readers to act as if they were watching a B-grade horror movie, shouting aloud, "Don't go there!" However sentimental, The Horse Whisperer is an engaging read, sort of like a finely tuned, well-edited film. --Rebekah Warren

From the Publisher:

A forty-ton truck hurtles out of control on a snowy country road, a teenagegirl on horseback in its path. In a few terrible seconds the life of a familyis shattered. And a mother's quest begins -- to save her maimed daughter and ahorse driven mad by pain. It is an odyssey that will bring her to...

The Horse Whisperer

He is the stuff of legend. His voice can calm wild horses and his touch healbroken spirits. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears,such men were once called Whisperers. Now Tom Booker, the inheritor of thisancient gift, is to meet his greatest challenge.

Annie Graves has traveled across a continent with her daughter, Grace, andtheir wounded horse, Pilgrim, to the Booker ranch in Montana. Annie has riskedeverything -- her career, her marriage, her comfortable life -- in her desperatebelief that the Whisperer can help them. The accident has turned Pilgrimsavage. He is now so demented and dangerous that everyone says he should bedestroyed. But Annie won't give up on him, for she feels his fate isinextricably entwined with that of her daughter, who has retreated into aheartrending, hostile silence. Annie knows that if the horse dies, somethingin Grace will die too.

In the weeks to come, under the massive sky of the Rocky Mountain Front, alltheir lives -- including Tom Booker's -- will be transformed forever in a waynone could have foretold. At once an epic love story and a gripping adventure,The Horse Whisperer weaves an extraordinary tale of healing andredemption -- a magnificent emotional journey that explores our ancient bondswith earth and sky and hearts untamed. It is a stirring elegy to the power ofbelief and self-discovery, to hopes lost and found again.

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