Jump!: Another joyful and dramatic romp from Jilly Cooper, the Sunday Times bestseller

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When her bullying husband dies, Etta's selfish, ambitious children drag her from her lovely Dorset home to live in a hideous modern bungalow in the Cotswold village of Willowwood.

Alas, squaring Jilly isn't all reward--there are even more characters and even more shifting and sorting of trysts, romantic and otherwise. The pace varies throughout the book, I felt that at times it plodded along beautifully giving the characters time to develop and then with the turn of a page it would begin to pick up and race along for a while before steadying back down. The rest of the novel focuses on the horse’s success on the training circuit and how the people in the syndicate interact with her.

She seems to have toned down the raunchiness (or maybe I have just grown up alot) but there was still the same old naughty characters getting up to the same tricks as well as some fabulous new characters establishing themselves for a new generation of Jilly fans. I asked one of my Goodreads friends for recommendations of a book with a woman who has a lot of hard luck and then it gets worse. Although I am not a horse person I enjoyed Cooper’s other novels but this one I found boring and hard to get through. Crammed into every page too, like a traffic report where everyone is sitting what everyone is saying. After a nail-biting court case, Mrs Wilkinson is awarded to Etta, thus ensuring the lasting and vengeful enmity of her evil former trainer and owner.

In recent years, she's succumbed to the lure of melodrama, and her books have become correspondingly more overblown and baggier. I felt like I really got to know the characters well and I really cared about what happened to them. Compounding the problems this novel focuses too much on the horse world, and not enough of what makes Cooper’s novels special, the relationships between her characters. The horse, named Mrs Wilkinson, forms a steadfast bond with Etta, and recovers to become a celebrated racehorse, competing in the biggest race of all, the Grand National at Aintree.

He's not even very realistic or believeable - in fact, it just makes me mad that she's stereotyped so massively and that her publishers and agents let her get away with this.

It's been a fair while since I've read a Jilly Cooper novel but I was soon back into the swing of things, laughing like a drain in places and wanting to give the downtrodden Etta a good shake as she's bullied by her selfish children. Here, one of the worst offenders is Bonny Richards, a ravishing actress who talks of "closure" and "my life's journey" and makes her lover, Valent Edwards, take elocution lessons, shrieking at him "It's a hangover, not an 'angover, Valent. Some of the characters came across as either unbelivably false or so stereotypical that it hurt to read their bits. The rest, fairly fun, although the scene and issues regarding Trixie's situation were rather serious and far more damaging for being glossed over as quickly as they were, especially given her age.Jilly’s descriptions of the glorious Cotswold countryside are some of the most lyrical ever written and her comedies of manners rival Nancy Mitford, if not Jane Austen. Etta's life changes when, in the snow in nearby woods, she finds a horribly mutilated filly, which she names Mrs Wilkinson and nurses back to health.