{"id":11878,"date":"2015-08-30T22:08:39","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T03:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/?p=11878"},"modified":"2016-03-20T21:44:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-21T02:44:00","slug":"lady-joe-is-a-keeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/?p=11878","title":{"rendered":"Lady Joe is a keeper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lady<\/a>Read the first paragraph of Lady Joe<\/em><\/a>, then try to put it down.<\/p>\n

I love good fiction, but from experience I am leery of books that cross my desk with horses’ names in the titles and horse trainers as main characters. So I was not prepared when Lady Joe<\/em>, by Mark Saha, grabbed me on the first page and held me until the buzzer.<\/p>\n

It was quite a ride – no less than 78 points on my scorecard.<\/p>\n

Aspiring young trainer Lee Estes never has to look for trouble because it always seems to show up like a stray hound. This time it finds him in charge of a Quarter Horse ranch while the owner is in Europe on business. One misadventure follows another, as Estes enlists the help of his hapless buddy Jim Harrison.<\/p>\n

Lady Joe’s broad appeal lies in the charm of her characters and the resolution of Lee Estes’ dilemma. But cutting veterans will relish Saha’s portrayal of their sport:<\/p>\n

“The brindle had more tricks than a gambler with a crooked deck and played every card.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“The following week, Lady Joe took on a cow from some other planet to win at South Point with a 231.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“They wanted to know what it feels like on the hurricane deck of a cutting horse when she gets down in front of a cow.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Mark Saha grew up in cotton country along the Texas Gulf Coast. He earned a BA at the University of Notre Dame; attended film school at UCLA, where a collection of his short stories won a Samuel Goldwyn Creative Writing Award; and for many years wrote scripts for film and television. He currently lives in Santa Monica, Calif.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the first paragraph of Lady Joe, then try to put it down. I love…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-movies","category-cutting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11878"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12236,"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11878\/revisions\/12236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sallyharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}