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

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I was devastated when I thought Mrs Wilkinson had died, but as usual you pulled it and back and Tears of joy not sadness came at the end. The filly charms everyone in the village, and whentests reveal her to be a spectacularly well-bred racehorse a village syndicate is formed to put the filly into training.

Whatever you like about Jilly's previous books-- the humor, the hyper Englishness of the settings both social and geographic, the lovable cad, the earnest young horsewoman, the horses so grateful for kindness that they'll jump the moon--they're all in there. The plot worked very well for me, with such a cast of characters it needed to be involved enough to keep the reader interested without becoming over complicated. 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. It's one heck of a book standing at over 700 pages so to be able to keep me immersed fairly consistently until the last page is no mean feat.When Etta Bancroft's husband Sampson dies, her bolshy children move her to the tiny village of Willowwood. 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. In recent years, she's succumbed to the lure of melodrama, and her books have become correspondingly more overblown and baggier. 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. I felt fairly uncomfortable as well with some of the work that Jilly did involving Pakistanis and Al Qaeda (I will leave you to wonder how she encompassed this into the world of jump racing!

Etta bankroft, what an awful lead character, I was honestly hoping she'd end up head butted to death by that idiot goat Chisolm (his own column? As did the scene where the elderly Major snuck into a hotel room and took advantage of a very drunk actress, who mistakenly assumed in the dark that he was her partner.Rafiq was a great character, and it is clear that Jilly is not racist in any way - and in fact was trying to present Muslims in a good light - but it felt so tacked on to the rest of the story. After her rich husband dies, Etta Bancroft’s children move her from her beloved home to a grotty bungalow nearer their own homes – mostly in a plight for their own pockets.

As for me I’m not giving up on Cooper, I’ll read the next novel in the series, I’m confident it will be as much fun as the other novels in the series and well worth the read. Her neighbour, powerful tycoon and ex-footballer Valent Edwards, has bought the big house next door. Etta Bancroft, newly widowed and completely bullied by her awful offspring is moved to a tiny bungalow in the Gloucestershire town of Willowwood. 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.

Only through sheer determination and constant complaining did I finish this diabolical excuse for a book! When her horrible husband dies, she's forced by her selfish children to sell her beautiful house and become the unpaid nanny to their ghastly brats. At her best, Jilly Cooper has a genius for combining soft-focus romance with the beady, pitiless social comedy of Jane Austen, or at least Nancy Mitford.

Jilly shows rare skill in presenting relationships from all walks of life - from bullying, to infidelity, from temporary passion, to love.Also, the description inside the sleeve tells you EVERYTHING that happens up until about 650 pages in, so that was, rather, a suspense killer.