Her relationship with Storm is finely observed and described and readers will lap up the tips on horse lore and care, as we watch them gradually learning to trust each other. Casey is a believable teenager, as stubborn and reckless as her horse. Lauren St John invests the story with a pace and a passion that prevents it from ever seeming formulaic. Despite the hardships they face Casey and the renamed Storm Warning will go to the ball – or in this case, the Badminton horse trials! Using the dollar bill they had just found in the gutter Casey and her father buy the horse, and she sets about nursing him back to strength. This is Silver Cyclone and he’s on his way to the knackers. Walking home one evening with her father, a crazed horse leaps out of nowhere, nearly crushing her. Of course, as we know very well, in the best pony stories those kind of things absolutely do happen.Ĭasey lives in inner-city Hackney and helps out at the shabby riding school nearby. ‘More than anything on earth I’d love to be flying over mad jumps on a horse with wings and competing against the world’s greatest riders, but those kind of things never happen to girls like me.’ So says heroine Casey Blue at the beginning of Lauren St John’s hugely enjoyable horse story.

To find out more, visit her website at One Dollar Horse Author: Lauren St John When not rescuing leopards and dolphins, she is a full-time valet to her rescued, and not in the least demanding, Bengal cat, Max.

A passionate conservationist, Lauren is an Ambassador for the Born Free Foundation, a patron for horse sanctuary, Mane Chance, and the founder of Authors4Oceans. Along with her veterinary nursing training, it served as perfect research for her Kat Wolfe mystery series and The Snow Angel, a standalone MG novel. Before becoming a children's author, she worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times, writing about sports, music and spies. Dead Man's Cove, the first in her Laura Marlin Mystery series, won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award.

Biography: Lauren St John grew up surrounded by horses, cats, dogs and a pet giraffe on a farm and game reserve in Zimbabwe, the inspiration for her bestselling White Giraffe and One Dollar Horse series, as well as her YA horse novel, The Glory.

The one dollar horse series