Kimbay

by Rose Doyle

Following the death of her father, Flora Carolan abandons her career in Europe and returns to Ireland and to Kimbay, the once successful stud farm Ned Carolan had worked all his life. Would she be able to restore the stud farm's fading fortunes, or would the jealousy of others bring failure?

327 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Rose Doyle is a writer and journalist. Her novels include Fate and Tomorrow (set in the Congo in 1902) and Shadows Will Fall , both international bestsellers. Trade Names, the book of her long-running series in The Irish Times, was published by New Island in 2004. In 2005 she contributed to New Island's successful Open Door series with The Story of Joe Brown. Heroes of Jadotville: The Soldiers' Story was published in September 2006. Comdt Patrick Quinlan, who led the Irish UN troops at Jadotville, was her uncle.

http://www.newisland.ie

Reviews

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reminded me of an Irish cross between Molly Keane and Borden Deal.

Living in the big house at Kimbay after her father's death, a young woman has to decide whether to give the Irish stud farm and racing world two years in a make-or-break effort or to go back to her French boyfriend, a businessman in Brussels.

This tale is not all that exciting however and I lost track of the many names coming and going. Flora is more of an onlooker and decision maker than a hands-on person, though she does do hands-on work as well. For no reason I can see she and others let anyone at all ride their hacking horses and bring strange horses into the yard at breeding season. There is a more experienced manager and she has a filly in training with a reasonable trainer. Flora however resents leaving the decisions to these people and gets their backs up while doing the wrong thing. Naturally there is an element who wants her to fail.

We never see what Flora did for a living in Brussels so it never feels real. The boyfriend there is too smooth and while he's pleasant, he's not a horseman, as Flora comes to discover. The one social element shown is a hunt ball, which seems tame to someone who's been there before they got to be just corporate entertainment pricing horsey people out of the market; the Dublin Horse Show and Irish Derby are also parts of the scene. The tale seems dated now, but not unpleasantly.

I suggest anyone interested in this book should also read 'Bluegrass' by Borden Deal, set in Kentucky.