What do you think?
Rate this book
Saddle Club #23
Horse Trouble
When Mrs. Reg, the manager of Pine Hollow Stables, goes away for a few days, The Saddle Club is determined to pitch in and keep things running smoothly. Lisa, Carole, and Stevie decide they know everything there is to know about horses, so they'll have no problem managing a stable for a few days...right? Wrong! instead it seems that every time the girls try to help, disaster quickly follows. More paint winds up on one of the horses than on the stable; several riders don't get quite the ride they expect; and Mrs. Reg's paperwork is in utter chaos. Soon the members of The Saddle Club are wondering if being horse crazy is all they need to manage the stable, after all!
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
About the author
Bonnie Bryant
407 books207 followersAmerican 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
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
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 30, 2021
This one is a lot of fun and is much more light-hearted as it doesn't involve The Saddle Club saving horses from a wildfire, dealing with injuries on a trail ride, or flying far from home. It's set right in cozy Pine Hollow and has a great plot of the girls taking over Mrs. Reg's stable managing duties while she's away for a week. A series of mishaps and misunderstandings ensue as the girls scramble to complete a list of impossible-to-decipher missions.
January 21, 2025
The main reason I stopped reading the Saddle Club series back in the late 1990s was due to its shift emphasizing people instead of horses. Bonnie Bryant mainly wrote novel adaptations of movies and television shows before striking it rich with the Saddle Club, and in the last books she wrote for the series, she'd revert back to writing Saddle Club books more akin to situation comedies and After School Specials than ... well ... the Saddle Club.
Most of the series can be found for free online now, so I've been giving it a bash. This one moved quickly, but didn't have much to do about horses or riding. The Saddle Club volunteers to manage Pine Hollow when Mrs. Reg is away for a week, out of guilt because they lost Mrs. Reg's gold and diamond pin.
Why the fuck anyone would bring such a valuable piece of jewelry to a STABLE is beyond me. And why would any reasonably intelligent adult allow a trio of 13 year olds to manage his business, completely unsupervised, is also beyond me.
I have come to the conclusion that Max has zero common sense. He's very smart about horses and riding -- but that's about it. Perhaps that's why he likes Carole so much. They're two of a kind.
Pepper has a brief cameo here, shown enjoying his retirement. Poor boy has only seven books left to live. Prancer is mentioned, but she also only warrants a cameo. I've never heard of a horse being scared of domestic cats, but with horses, there's often a first for everything. May and her pony Luna was introduced a couple of books ago. This book is sort of a preview of the spin-off series Pony Tales, which would start in 1995.
And it's never a good idea to give a horse two grain dinners in a row, one following right after the other. That's a great way to cause colic. But poor Garnet keeps getting described alternately as a mare, and then a gelding, so perhaps she is really two horses in one.
Most of the series can be found for free online now, so I've been giving it a bash. This one moved quickly, but didn't have much to do about horses or riding. The Saddle Club volunteers to manage Pine Hollow when Mrs. Reg is away for a week, out of guilt because they lost Mrs. Reg's gold and diamond pin.
Why the fuck anyone would bring such a valuable piece of jewelry to a STABLE is beyond me. And why would any reasonably intelligent adult allow a trio of 13 year olds to manage his business, completely unsupervised, is also beyond me.
I have come to the conclusion that Max has zero common sense. He's very smart about horses and riding -- but that's about it. Perhaps that's why he likes Carole so much. They're two of a kind.
Pepper has a brief cameo here, shown enjoying his retirement. Poor boy has only seven books left to live. Prancer is mentioned, but she also only warrants a cameo. I've never heard of a horse being scared of domestic cats, but with horses, there's often a first for everything. May and her pony Luna was introduced a couple of books ago. This book is sort of a preview of the spin-off series Pony Tales, which would start in 1995.
And it's never a good idea to give a horse two grain dinners in a row, one following right after the other. That's a great way to cause colic. But poor Garnet keeps getting described alternately as a mare, and then a gelding, so perhaps she is really two horses in one.
January 8, 2020
Silly and delightful. I remember really liking this one as a kid because of the Amelia Bedelia vibes. There's nothing quite like a series of mistakes and misunderstandings that miraculously resolve to really satisfy. A sweet story with the girls safe at home in the stables and having the easy sorts of adventures that involve scheduling mistakes and painting SNAFU's instead of avalanches and wildfires.
(although, either Bryant or the ghost writer did misgender Garnet in this one - that made me chuckle!)
(although, either Bryant or the ghost writer did misgender Garnet in this one - that made me chuckle!)
January 17, 2023
In this book, the stable manager takes a few days off of work at Pine Hollow. The Saddle Club think they know everything in the world there is to know about horses and running a business. A lot of kids and young adults think that they know more than they know, and then find themselves way in over their heads. Carole, Lisa, and Stevie learned this lesson in a hard way in this book. Everything they tried to help with turned out into an absolute disaster. I found this book to be extremely obnoxious, but that is probably because these three were wreaking havoc and being frustrating.
July 2, 2025
great book
love the stories
and the friendship in the club
love the stories
and the friendship in the club
January 13, 2022
I love this book
August 4, 2011
A good series for horse crazy young teens. I loved it when I was younger.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews