Saddled, How a Spirited Horse Reined Me in and Set Me Free by Susan Richards

Here was another woeful attempt at finding a New York Times Bestseller that I could recommend to my kids. Hey-(Hay is for horses)I really enjoyed the book, and chose it because what teen/preteen girl isn't into a story about a horse?! But My Friend Flicka this is not. This is an auto biography about a woman with a troubled childhood (very) who becomes an alcoholic with a wife-beating husband and a pattern for self destruction. I have carefully chosen my path so my children have a good chance of not having to experience these things as children, and I can't see myself recommending they read about them either. Plenty of time to be an adult, when life shows itself in all facets. For now, I like to show them the art of the possible. Fortunately, Richards has a deep love and attachment to horses, and one horse in particular who becomes her lifesaver. This horse is the focus of the woman, but not necessarily the narrative.
Still, I always have some angst when faced with statements like the one Richards makes on page 158; "I concluded there were two kinds of crazy people: the ones who knew they were crazy and the ones who didn't. Those who didn't were the ones you had to worry about." So, I start to worry about myself. I don't think I'm crazy. That makes me one of the dangerous crazies. Then, as I ruminate about this, I come to a third conclusion. There are the crazies, the crazies who don't know it, and the rest of us, who don't tend to hang out with alcoholics, batterers, drug dealers, or their counselors. Maybe because Susan Richards spent the first 18 years in a really screwy, unfriendly family, then the next 12 years in a booze filled haze, the next 10 years in hiding and then the next 10 becoming a drug counselor for addicts, she tends to have a narrow view of the population. This is what I hope. I also hope to allow my kids the security to not have to deal with the screwy, the beaten, the boozed up and the addicted until they are able to handle these facts of life without internalizing or normalizing them. There are better things to consider normal.