Jules Thornton the event rider and her boyfriend Pete Morrison return following their dramatic experiences in Forward in the Eventing series. During the sixth book PROSPECT, The Alachua Eventing Co-op employs Jules to run a barn and train young riders, while Pete is away in California.

We’ve followed Jules from her crazy, lonesome days as a young rider aiming for championships in eventing, living in Ocala, Florida. By now, through many moves, she’s in a quieter spot with a found family of her barn manager Lacey and a dozen young riders, in their first year of eventing after pony shows. Her top horse Dynamo is running well but starting to age out of competition – but she’s bringing on Danger Mouse, owned by the syndicate. Jules also has two young horses in training and in this instalment, she learns that you can’t please everyone and shouldn’t try. That doesn’t stop her trying, because every broad aim feels like the success that was once a narrow point.

As in earlier books, there isn’t much cross-country compared to dressage. There are many lines about training for deep seat and pretty gaits, and few about teaching your horse to jump immovable obstacles. The syndicate of parents starts planning to turn the graceful, storm-proof barn into a country club with extra rows of stabling. I felt, as did Jules, that this would put bling ahead of horsemanship. They hold catered barn parties at shows, a shock to Jules’s system because she never has time to socialise. But a social event is not such a bad thing. Evan Folkes is assembling a senior team, with Jules a likely choice, and this adds to the pressure.

I dislike the way that major occurrences are off the page, and Jules recounts them while she does something else, generally competing at the top level, which is absolutely not realistic. Those two or ten minutes hold nothing but you and your horse. On the other hand, a line sparked recognition four or five times, “This happens a lot? It happened to her too?” Horses, horsey people, and horsey women have a great deal in common it seems, not all pleasant. And we each think it’s just us.

Natalie Keller Reinert has been there and done that, and her minor characters recur, which is good for those following the story, but bad for anyone starting the eight-book Eventing series. PROSPECT could be a standalone for the keen rider, but I recommend starting from the start, hurricanes, triumphs, breakups and all. We learn from mistakes, and if you learn from Jules, you may not make some mistakes.