Very enjoyable romance with a bit of mystery and some horse racing thrown in. Topical and informative too. Who knew cloned horses are now on the way to being officially allowed to race. :) Loved both of the lead characters, but especially Mae. ( )

Mae St. John is a young woman from Georgia whose Grandmother, the woman who raised her, just died and that, along with that fact Mae also finds herself with only a bit of hidden money and her grandmother's dog Rhett's 'trust fund', and she's being kicked out of the house she grew up in because it has been foreclosed on. Then, she finds out that her father (who she thought had died) is alive and well in another state.

Louisiana is where Mae, through her father, meets and gets 'hired' (sorta) by Whit Casey. Whit is a horse trainer and runs a magazine and website about quarter-horses as well. Whit has even more than that on her plate also since her father, Clinton, a very well known horse trainer, is in the early stages of Alzheimer, not to mention Whit is about halfway broken up with a semi-in the closet girlfriend and Clinton Casey has gotten in with the wrong people and is about to lose the farm if an up and coming horse with a good mom and pop doesn't come through in the races.

There were things that I really liked, things I didn't really like and then there was Clinton Casey's disease. I thought that it was really, really well done and well written the back and forth between good days and bad, heck, between good hours and bad hours, but because it was so good and well done, at some points it was heart warming, but more often it was heart wrenching and were a little hard to read.

On the topic of things I liked, I really, really liked the character of Jodi. She threw an interesting and different twist into the story, one that I didn't see coming and that made the story that much more cohesive.

On the other hand, my main problem with the book was at the beginning. It took me a bit to get into the novel because I thought that a lot of the characters were just really unlikable at the beginning. For the most part as the book went on I started to like most of the characters better, especially the main character, but, at the beginning I just couldn't stand them. I'm glad I finished the book, but at the time, I was wondering whether I even should.

Overall a solid lesbian fic book with a lot of information on horses and racing that I didn't know and a story that after a rocky start, held my attention.

I got this advanced galley through Netgalley on behalf of Bold Strokes Books. ( )