A review by erinlonneman
The Ghost Horse: A True Story of Love, Death, and Redemption by Joe Layden

2.0

I think I likely gave myself a false notion of this book and assumed it would be mostly about the horse Lisa's Booby Trap. The entire first half of the book was actually about Tim Snyder her trainer and his background. From an abusive step father and broken family, to alcoholism he had an incredibly rough upbringing. I respect how honest he was about his struggles. The parts about his wife were also interesting and she sounded like a really amazing woman. I just really was hoping to read a book about a horse, and this was not it. I felt like the author kept reiterating himself to make the book longer which just made it repetitive, and I did not particularly enjoy his style. Tim and some of the other people interviewed were very knowledgeable horsemen and once we got to that part I enjoyed it. It was marred by the author incorrectly saying Lisa's Booby Trap was 17.5 hands tall. There is no 17.5 hands as a hand is a 4" unit of measurement and the decimal does NOT represent a fraction as non horse people would normally assume, it represents the remaining inches, so 17.5 would actually by 18.1.

There felt like too much background about the racing industry and horses as well. This could just be because I assumed this book was wrote for people who already were involved in the horse industry, but it was not, and just felt dumbed down.

Overall I felt this book missed what could have been a great story by saving it for the last 50 pages, and it had a hard time keeping my attention in the 150 pages leading up to that. While it covered the difficulty of grief accurately it also glossed over how detrimental alcoholism and drug addiction is for the people around the addict, and I just wanted a horse book, not all of this.