Joey

April 16, 2018
Grief counselor Bleakley shares the touching story of Joey, a blind horse who struggles to adjust to his rescue facility. Focusing on Kim Tschirret, founder of Hope Reins (a ranch that employs rescue horses to help traumatized children), Bleakley explores how the facility took a risk by bringing in Joey, who needed a lot of love, care, and financial investment to make him comfortable in his new surroundings. Tschirret was inexperienced in running businesses and initially unprepared for the amount of work and money required to properly heal and train horses. She secured funding from a local church but still had to overcome challenges that drained her bank account and energy: repairing malfunctioning equipment, securing fencing around the property, and dealing with problems of her own making, as when she let Joey out and he was injured by the newly installed wire fencing. In sometimes overwrought prose (“2 Corinthians 1 explains that God comforts us in our time of need, so that we can comfort others in their time of need... comfort reserved for the hurting children and their families”), Bleakley shares how Joey learned to help other horses trust their handlers and comforted a seemingly inconsolable boy named Ethan who was rejected by the foster family that adopted his three younger siblings. Bleakley’s sentimental book makes Joey a fine example of patience and unconditional acceptance, and will appeal to Christian animal lovers.

A debut book tells the true story of a horse therapy ranch's success helping traumatized children.Kim Tschirret's father was an emotionally aloof alcoholic. As a child, she found comforting solace in a relationship with her saddlebred horse, Country. That experience inspired her as an adult to found an equine therapy ranch in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hope Reins, a daunting and potentially expensive task but one that her husband, Mike, wholeheartedly supported. The Bay Leaf Baptist Church also believed in her mission and expressed its confidence in her by leasing Tschirret 20 acres of its land for only $1 a month. She learned about the heartbreaking plight of Joey, a leopard Appaloosa, who just barely survived malnourishment after his owners abandoned him. He was found emaciated and blind, and it took weeks to slowly nurse him back to some measure of stable health, all points of concern for Tschirret. But when she heard that he was so gentle he allowed a 5-year-old to ride him bareback, she decided to bring him to Hope Reins. Joey's impact on the ranch was immediate: he befriended Speckles, a cantankerous horse suffering from terrible arthritic pain. He also helped to coax Ethan and Aly, two troubled and socially withdrawn children, out of their protective shells. But running a horse ranch turned out to be a costly affair, a predicament exacerbated by Speckles' mounting health care costs. Meanwhile, Sarah Stewart, a young volunteer, became a naturally talented counselor but quietly struggled with an abusive past that she was ashamed of as well as her shaken faith in God. Bleakley lucidly braids all these storylines into a coherent narrative tapestry about the power of faith as an antidote to anxiety and trust in God as a counterpoint to an uncertain future. The prose is plenty sentimental but stops short of becoming cloying, avoiding the pitfall of too laboriously plying a lachrymose reaction from readers. But sometimes the narrative is a bit overly didactic, stressing too ostentatiously the lessons embedded in the story. Still, this is a touching tale, and Joey's extraordinary, intuitive sensitivity is memorably depicted. At one point, the horse comforts a distraught Ethan: "Joey never moved. He stood fiercely and firmly, providing refuge for the weeping boy. Two deeply wounded creatures were giving and finding solace in one another."A tender account of an abused animal's healing power.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)