There's no excuse for the phrase "shaven haven" ever to be employed in print, and there's something decidedly unsettling about a scene in which a foursome involving an unwilling and underage girl is presented in any way as erotic.

Crammed into every page too, like a traffic report where everyone is sitting what everyone is saying.

Jilly Cooper is not a subtle novellist--her plots are twisty, her characters larger than life--but she delivers page-turning, emotion-packed stories, perfect for a bit of self-indulgent reading when you really should be getting on with something else, but, oh, never mind. When Mrs Wilkinson, a horse, is found beaten and tortured, the immediate priority is, of course, nursing her back to health.

In recent years, she's succumbed to the lure of melodrama, and her books have become correspondingly more overblown and baggier.That said, the real love story, between Etta and the unvarnishable Valent, falters tentatively along in a deeply endearing way and is all the more appealing set against the frantic jodhpur-ripping that's taking place elsewhere. When her bullying husband dies, Etta's selfish, ambitious children drag her from her lovely Dorset home to live in a hideous modern bungalow in the Cotswold village of Willowwood. I found the characters to be believable, there were many who could have turned into stereotyped clichés but Cooper kept them on the right side of convincing. I also know that I will be scooped up into a world where Jilly examines relationships, social considerations and class differences.

The filly charms everyone in the village, and when tests reveal her to be a spectacularly well-bred racehorse a village syndicate is formed to put the filly into training. Also, the description inside the sleeve tells you EVERYTHING that happens up until about 650 pages in, so that was, rather, a suspense killer. Despite the ballooning cast lists and increasingly febrile plots, she remains adept at bringing these people to such glittering, thrusting life that they feel almost real.The plot of this one is simple, when Etta Bancroft’s domineering husband dies her children move her out of beloved home into a small cottage on their property and turn her into a babysitter and housekeeper. I read some bad reviews of this one, but since I wasn’t impressed with the last of the series I’d read (The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous), I thoroughly enjoyed this.

When it turns out that she is a very well-bred thoroughbred racehorse, Etta dreams of putting her into training, but without any money she hopes in vain. Whatever you like about Jilly's previous books-- the humor, the hyper Englishness of the settings both social and geographic, the lovable cad, the earnest young horsewoman, the horses so grateful for kindness that they'll jump the moon--they're all in there.A village syndicate is formed to put the filly into training, consisting of a riotous mix of local characters, who set off to the races in a minibus clanking with bottles.