Headstrong

Pine Hollow #14

by Bonnie Bryant

The holidays are approaching. Carole Hanson and Lisa Atwood are discovering that romance can appear in unexpected places, while Stevie Lake is searching for the perfect gift for her boyfriend. With their attention focused elsewhere, none of them realize that their friend Callie Forester may be riding into trouble.

Callie can be incredibly single-minded. She won't let anything come between her and her goal, and right now her goal is to get back into competitive riding. So every day she hits the trails around Pine Hollow for hours at a time--just Callie and her horse out in the peaceful woods, all alone. But the woods may not be as empty as Callie thinks.

Genres: Horses, Young Adult, Animals, Childrens, Fiction

240 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 10, 2000

About the author

American author of children's books. She is best known for creating the intermediate horse book series The Saddle Club, which was published from October 1988 until April 2001. The Saddle Club chronicled the adventures of thirteen-year-old Lisa Atwood and twelve-year-olds Stephanie "Stevie" Lake and Carole Hanson. The series was static in time; the girls never aged in 101 books, 7 special editions, and 3 Inside Stories.

Bonnie Bryant also wrote two spin-off series: Pony Tails, aimed at beginning readers, and Pine Hollow, aimed at teenage readers. The 16 Pony Tails books followed the lives of eight-year-olds May Grover, Corey Takamura, and Jasmine James. Pine Hollow featured Carole, Lisa, Stevie, and their new friends in a series set four years after The Saddle Club. Unlike The Saddle Club, Pine Hollow conformed to a realistic timeline. The 17 books took place over the span of less than a year. Later a television show called The Saddle Club, based on the books, was filmed in Australia.

Bonnie Bryant wrote at least 38 The Saddle Club books and 2 Pine Hollow books herself; after that they were taken over by a team of ghostwriters, a common practice in long-running children's book series. Ghostwriters for the Saddle Club and Pine Hollow books included Caitlin Macy (sometimes credited as Caitlin C. Macy), Catherine Hapka, Sallie Bissell, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Helen Geraghty, Tina deVaron, Cat Johnston, Minna Jung, and Sheila Prescott-Vessey.

Bonnie Bryant is also the author of many novelizations of movies, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Karate Kid, and Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, written under her married name, B.B. Hiller. She also collaborated in the ghostwriting of The Baby-sitters Club Super Special #14: BSC in the USA, published under the name of its creator, Ann M. Martin.

Bonnie Bryant was born and raised in New York City. She met her husband, Neil W. Hiller, in college, where they both worked on the campus newspaper. They had two sons, Emmons Hiller and Andrew Hiller. Neil Hiller died in 1989. Many of Bonnie's books are dedicated to him.
***from wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Callie, new friend of The Saddle Club, is getting herself into a pickle. She was sidelined from competitive riding due to an auto accident, and is obsessively trying to get back into the saddle and ready for competition. There is still some relationship drama going on in this book, but I liked it better than some of the last ones.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

RED FLAG. I'm not red flagging the book. The book is fine. I'm red flagging the behavior of some characters that is CLEARLY suspicious but the girls do not notice. Or worse, fall into the trap of "It must be something that I did wrong."

[Zaza (Mackenzie) · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Carole, Lisa and Stevies minds elsewhere, Callie might be getting so trouble following her.