New Equestrian Novel, Turning For Home, Now Available!

by Natalie Keller Reinert

I'm happy to announce that Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4) is now available!

This new installment of these "Horse Books for Grown-ups," which began back in 2011 with the publication of The Head and Not The Heart, then continued with the 2014 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award semi-finalist, Other People's Horses and the holiday short Claiming Christmas, returns to the dark bay beauty that Alex fell so hard for at Aqueduct Racetrack, The Tiger Prince.

Because grown-ups deserve pony stories too!

The charismatic Tiger has run his last race, and it wasn't pretty. Alex is faced with an agonizing decision: how can she retire a hot-tempered gelding who has no place on a breeding farm, but is such a pet that he can't be sold or adopted out?

Then, as if life wasn't complicated enough, another scandal is breaking over the racing industry. Racehorses are found abandoned and starving in the Everglades -- and a radical animal rights group pins the blame on Alex. Hate mail and death threats, plus a mysterious new neighbor who is making life downright dangerous, throw Alex's training career into a tailspin.

Stuck on the farm, exiled from the racetrack, angry and shell-shocked,  Alex and Tiger have more in common than ever. When a Thoroughbred Makeover event is announced for late spring, Alexander and Kerri both encourage Alex to seize the opportunity and show everyone that she's fully capable of responsible racehorse retirement. It's a move that could make -- or break -- her training career. 

Turning For Home returns to some of my favorite places: the rolling hills of Ocala, the small-town feel of Tampa Bay Downs. And it takes on one of my favorite subjects, racehorse retirement. That's actually what got me started in this whole writing game, you know -- writing Retired Racehorse Blog back when I had a little Florida farm, some broodmares and foals, and one wonderful gelding that I'd gotten off the track and was training to be an event horse.

I actually trained that horse, in part, to prove to myself that I still could do it. I guess in that way, I'm a lot like Alex in this story. Is retraining a racehorse like riding a bike? At some point, muscle memory kicks in, right? It seemed that way for me, when I was out riding Final Call. I used the memory of those rides to write about Alex as she rides Tiger.

I hope that helps the story ring true for equestrians -- that's always my number one goal as a writer! And according to this review at Amazon, looks like I have...

"I've always known Natalie Keller Reinert is one of the rare authors who truly understands the ways of the Thoroughbred horse (and of the people who love them), but either she has truly outdone herself here, or else I just love this book because it's more about retraining an Off-The-Track Thoroughbred ("OTTB" for short) once its racing days are done, and that end of a Thoroughbred's life is much more familiar to me than the racing side. Ms. Reinert is fortunate enough to have had plenty of experience on both the racing side and the sport horse side, and she brings it ALL to this book. Her writing is confident, her perceptions accurate, and her characters are so alive that I found myself mentally arguing with them over their choices as I read. :-) I really could not recommend this book more highly for horse lovers!"

Enjoy Turning For Home, and be sure to let me know what you think! You can read the first chapter at my website, nataliekreinert.com, or check out the previews available wherever you buy ebooks. The paperback is also available from Amazon.com.

Links:

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From Racehorse to Ranch Horse

by Natalie Keller Reinert

There are very nice people in the world who refer to me as a "horse expert." Of course, I'm not a horse expert in my eyes, I'm a person who has spent most of my life learning as much as I possibly can about horses, and that makes me an active enthusiast at best. Yes I can saddle-break a baby and inseminate a mare and remove eyelid stitches and jump a preliminary cross-country course and perform reasonable tempi changes on a well-trained horse and yes, teach a young racehorse to break from the gate.

An expert to most folks, maybe. But to the most of the readers of this blog I'm probably just... maybe a slightly above-average horsewoman? (You can tell me in the comments, if you promise to be nice.)

I got an email a few weeks ago from a reader at my site, Retired Racehorse, asking me to write about Gate to Great and Off-Track Thoroughbreds (OTTBs) who are being retrained as Western horses.

It went something to the effect of: You write a lot about OTTBs competing in English disciplines, what about Western ones? They excel at everything.

At Gate to Great, they know Western OTTBs are totally a thing. Photo: Gate to Great/gatetogreat.com

And while Thoroughbreds do, obviously, excel at everything, because sheer athleticism, curiosity, drive, and intelligence are traits wanted in every discipline, I really had nothing to write about. Because I just don't know much about Western riding.

I've been in a Western saddle maybe four or five times in my life, and that probably includes pony rides as a small child. The last time I was in a Western saddle, on an Appaloosa mare, she reared up and flipped over on me. Accustomed to the relative ease of dismounting from a flat saddle (I was an exercise rider at the time, riding about ten two-year-old Thoroughbreds every morning on the racetrack) I floundered in the Western saddle's high horn and cantle, got whacked in the forehead with her solid-rock poll, and eventually found myself on the ground, out cold.

A good craftsman never blames her tools, to be sure, but in this case this wasn't my tool, it was the owner's tool, and I owed her money, so I got on her damn horse and... I guess I am a little angsty about that saddle.

I also knew a Thoroughbred who was a very successful barrel racer. His name was, fittingly, Rocket. And my first OTTB, Amarillo, learned about the Real World outside the racetrack by moving cattle from pasture to pasture in rural Florida. (One of my very few Western rides was my test ride on Amarillo. He was so awesome, despite my complete discomfort in the saddle, that I just galloped him around the arena and then told my mom he was the one. He was.)

So I looked up Gate to Great finally, because their name is starting to crop up everywhere, and I was starting to feel distinctly inexpert about the whole situation, which isn't great for a person who runs a blog called Retired Racehorse and ostensibly knows a whole lot about retired racehorses.

And you know what? It's kind of amazing. I'm starting to feel very left out of the whole Western Thoroughbred Revolution.



In this fantastic video, you get an introduction to Thoroughbreds working with cattle, and the one word that springs to my mind is fun. These horses are having so much fun. I want to be one of these horses and have as much fun as they're having. It's ridiculous.

The Gate to Great folks are even sending horses to the Retired Racehorse Training Project's Thoroughbred Makeover in October, and you won't believe what they have planned:

The event, named “Who Let the Cows Out?”, will pair celebrity jockeys with retired Thoroughbred racehorses from the Gate to Great training program of Newell, South Dakota to compete on the Pimlico track in a “team sorting” event.  Each team of two horses and riders will have a maximum of two minutes to sort a small herd of numbered cattle into a corral in numeric order.  The team with the fastest time and correct sorting order wins the competition. The event requires cow sense, teamwork and fast thinking on the part of both the horses and riders.    - Press Release from Retired Racehorse Training Project

I can't even believe that this is an actual thing. I also can't believe I'm not going to be there. The event, held on October 5-6 at Pimlico Racecourse in Maryland, is going to be amazing. I just have other plans I can't change! Oh the humanity!

So there you have it. From racehorse to ranch horse, and apparently having a blast doing it. I apologize to my original reader for having to send that letter and get my attention out of the English world and into the Western one. What can I say? For a "horse expert," I reckon I have a lot to learn.

What about you? Do you consider yourself a well-rounded equestrian, or are there elements of riding and training out there that have simply escaped you over the years? I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of  -- we all know the saying "Jack of all trades, master of none," right? But then again, I'm starting to think there are some horses out there who might laugh at that phrase. It's looking like some horses can literally do everything, and do it well!

Visit Gate to Great and see their wonderful videos and training stories at GatetoGreat.com

Love and Affection and Jealousy and Dinner

by Natalie Keller Reinert

So I used to have this horse named Rapidan.

Rapidan was kind of insane. He'd been a racehorse, he'd been a teasing stallion, and then he somehow found himself in a backyard in a town named Palatka. Palatka is every bit as urbane and sophisticated as it sounds, and if you are a Thoroughbred stallion with decided mental issues, a backyard there maybe isn't the best place for you. Especially if you get there and you're sharing that backyard with a goat and two massive pigs. Just saying. Think of your options.

Rapidan had the necessary corrections made to his anatomy before I got there, but the horse I took home from the company of the pigs and the goat was still fairly insane. Too much testosterone, not enough training. I gave him a lot of leeway under saddle, and absolutely none on the ground. To this day, Rapidan is the only horse to have ever kicked me when I walked behind him in the cross-ties. You know how you're always warned to stay close to the tail when walking behind a horse in cross-ties? Yes. Do that. It works.

Rapidan only kicked me once, I'll put it to you like that.

He was less than captivating when I got him. Palatka backyards can do that to a horse.

I had Rapidan maybe a year, and in that course of time he developed, as studdish horses will, the most extraordinary personality. I moved him to a farm where he could live outside and he thrived. He loved being ridden and I started grooming and tacking him without so much as putting a halter on -- he just stood there free in the five-acre pasture, enjoying the attention.

And the coolest thing Rapidan did? He came when he was called.

I could stand at the gate and gaze out across the field and shout RAP-I-DAN! and that horse's head would shoot up, and his ears would prick, and his tail would flag, and he'd come a'runnin'. He'd gallop all the way up the pasture and throw on the brakes three strides before the gate, sending sand flying into my face.

The thing about Rapidan? He thought he was the Black Stallion. He really, truly believed that. And his impression, thundering up to the gate when he heard my call, standing without restraint to be groomed and tacked, was pretty damn good.

It's hard to tell what sort of personal affection a horse might hold for a person, and I never give them a lot of credit besides the general "Human Feeds Me, Human Good" assessment. But every now and then you meet a horse like Rapidan, who gave you that little thrill -- he likes me! -- just by being in a big hurry to see you every day. My big, scary, bad-tempered Black Stallion gave me love and affection, instead of just demanding his dinner -- I liked that.

Today I visited with a horse I used to see every day, but haven't been around in a few weeks. He was hanging out in the barn, and I was leaning on the paddock gate, waiting for him to notice me and come say hello, but he wasn't in a big hurry to leave his hay.

So I called him.

His head came out of that stall so fast you'd have thought I'd shaken a feed bucket. Then out he came. To see me, right?

No, to preemptively chase away his buddy in case the other horse thought he could visit with me.

Then he came to say hello.

And I thought, now that's affection. Not just coming over to say hello, but making sure no one else gets any part of me.

Or any feed buckets I might be secreting on my person, I suppose.

Whatever, I felt loved.

*by the way, you can read more about Rapidan here, at Retired Racehorse. And Palatka.