If I were asked to name two things I’ve loved for as long as I can remember, it would be horses and books. The two are so intertwined at the forefront of my mind that when I was applying to grad school and an admissions counsellor with a Southern Accent asked me how long I’d been interested in ‘riding’, it took me a second to realize she actually said writing.
When I started my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, a professor warned that pursuing writing on a serious scale would forever change the way I read. No longer content to fall into the fictive dream of reading, that feeling of being immersed in a fictional world, he cautioned that I would find myself scrutinizing every line of a book, analyzing every choice made by an author. Would this ruin reading for me? I wondered. I worried it would be the reading equivalent of driving down the road and having someone else in the car point out a “beautiful” horse, only to lay eyes on a homely creature of awkward proportions, unable to look at a horse without dissecting the flaws in its conformation.
I’ve never been likely to walk by a book with a horse on the cover, whether it was The Saddle Club in my elementary school library, Jilly Cooper’s Riders at a used book sale or Horse Crazy by Sarah Maslin Nir at the Wellington Barnes & Noble. This method of picking out reading material has led to me to consume literature of a broad spectrum of quality.
Earlier this month, I saw a post on The Chronicle of Horse titled “Looking for Equine Bloggers.” I opened the post: Just finished my latest equine mystery, “Commander Speaks,” and I’m looking for equine bloggers who might want to review it. Well, I thought, perhaps I could the person for the job. This blog, while seldom updated of late, would fall under the umbrella of “equine.”
I sent an email to the author, Jody Jaffe, and after a short conversation, had a copy of Commander Speaks in my inbox. The gist of the book is as follows: the titular character, Commander, is an imported warmblood owned by a mystery writer who seeks help from Izzie, an animal communicator, when Commander won’t stop biting her. Commander confides in Izzie some wrongdoings among the humans in the barn, leading Izzie and Commander’s owner to solve the mystery of a murder that takes place in the tack stall at a horse show.
That professor was right, and to some extent I’ve lost my ability to read a book for the sake of reading without hyper-critical analysis of the literary tools therein (a similar experience, I imagine, to a copy editor reading this blog.) Nonetheless, I sat down to read Commander Speaks with the goal of a blog post in mind, knowing that an “equine blog” is not the venue for ramblings on the merit of the omniscient point of view. As my first official book review, I’ve elected to highlight three things I think any of my readers would enjoy about Commander Speaks:
1. Jody Jaffe knows her stuff
The trouble with fiction as it relates to horses—and fellow readerly equestrians will corroborate this argument in the reviews section of any horse-related novel on Goodreads—is that it often falls into one of two categories: An otherwise well-written story in which the author has a tenuous grasp on the details that pertain to horses, or accurately depicted horse details that are somewhat peripheral to the plotline.
I once read a one-star review of a book that will remain unnamed: “If you are a horse person you will find the inaccuracies and impossibilities get in the way of enjoying the story.” I think this comment will resonate with any horse person who has found themselves reading something that betrays the author’s inexperience with horses. Books that depict horses accurately are rare gems mined from shelves of books containing references to “white stallions” and riders dismounting by swinging their leg over the horse’s head.
Commander Speaks stands out for its honest depiction of the hunter/jumper world. Jody Jaffe is clearly an experienced horse person, and the horses, venues, and people in the story are depicted in a realistic and technically correct way that won’t take you out of the story. The characters are believable, and many of them serve as recognizable figures to anyone in the horse world, from the nervous adult amateur to the lecherous “big name trainer” to Commander himself.
2. It’s highly relatable
Commander’s owner, Mrs. Abernathy, is an amateur rider with a penchant for pulling in front of the jumps and a nemesis in the 2’6” Special Adult Hunters. The reader understands that “Mrs. A” is loosely based on the author herself, and rather than painting Mrs. A as a superlatively talented Grand Prix rider, Jaffe uses her own experiences as an adult amateur to paint a realistic portrait of horse ownership as the mystery unfolds.
Aspiring fiction writers are often warned about using characters as mouthpieces for our own beliefs, and while this is something Jaffe definitely does in the book, it would have bothered me a lot more had I not agreed with most of her points, from politics to nosebands to Safe Sport and drugging horses. References to real-life individuals such as George Morris and even Luigi Mangione lend Jaffe's fictional characters credibility and place the story effectively in the present day. Which brings me to my final point:
3. It’s relevant to our times
Commander Speaks addresses important topics such as animal welfare (“social license to operate”), grooming/sexual predation, and social inequalities in the horse world. While it’s packaged as a tongue in cheek, fast-paced murder mystery, Jaffe should be commended for putting herself out there and addressing some serious issues that plague our industry head-on. If you’re looking for a fun, fast read that speaks to the current climate of the hunter/jumper world, look no further than Commander Speaks, available here on Amazon in paperback and for Kindle.
Thank you to Jody Jaffe for providing a copy of Commander Speaks and for trusting me as an "equine blogger" to write this review.
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