Synopsis: Grace wakes up on a lovely winter morning. She puts her clothes on and quietly goes downstairs. Gets some breakfast and goes to the stables to saddle Pilgrim for a morning ride with her friend Judith and her horse. Everything looks wonderful and they decide to take a route they haven’t ridden for a while. But threw the snow they lose the route. They decide to go up a hill to get back on the route while one of the horses starts to slip on snow covered ice. Meanwhile a trucker is making his way down an old road to deliver his load. He sees the two girls in trouble with their horses and knows that he won’t be able to stop in time.
Review: What should have been a wonderful day ends in a total disaster. Judith and her horse died, Pilgrim is badly wounded and on the run, and Grace is lying in a coma. The local vet tracks Pilgrim down together with a cop and one of the local hunters. The horse is found more dead then alive near a river. The hunter suggests taking the house down. But the vet has promised Grace’s mother to bring the horse back alive. They barely are able to get the horse away and to safety. In the end, even the vet think that it would have been better, for both the horse and the family if the horse would have died.
Grace’s mother Annie has made a nice career. She has everything, and then her little girl ends up in hospital. She meets her husband Robert, a lawyer at the hospital, where he tells her that she’s still in a coma and that she will lose part of her leg. They both take turns at Grace’s side. Grace not only thinks of her daughters’ recovery, but also about the horse. Who is kept back at the stables, but is in terrible condition. She’s heard about certain people who use some technique, some even call it magic and manage to heal horses that have been threw terrible things, just like Pilgrim. She goes hunting for more information about these people and ends up with a name: Tom Brookes a so called horse whisperer. After some phone calls, Tom comes over to see the horse. But he tells her that it’s a lost case. He never saw a horse like that and can’t do anything. Annie isn’t used to responses like this and she decides to go the Tom’s Range together with Grace, and she starts arranging things and packs for a week long trip.
The book was released again when the movie came out with Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas. The book of course has more of the whole story in it. But the essence of the story is still the same, which at least is a good thing. Here you have your classic love story: happy family, getting in a crisis and some how getting threw it. I don’t mind to know what goes to Grace’s mind threw her recovery. It’s the relation between Tom and Grace that I understood in the movie, and didn’t need to know all these bedroom details. The story about every one healing their wounds is great though, a remarkable story, tolled in great detail.
Title: The Horse Whisperer |
