Chosen Forever: A Memoir

Any voracious reader as I am, loves the times when a book overtakes them so completely they lose all track of time. This was the case with me for Chosen Forever, Susan Richard's more than worthy sequel to Chosen By A Horse. I hadn't even known there was a sequel until two weeks ago when browsing through the bookstore while my granddaughter played nearby. How happy I was to find this gem! Chosen by a Horse chronicled how a rescue horse named Lay Me Down changed Richards' life. In Chosen Forever, we see how writing the book itself affected her in ways she never imagined. As one who has been an author escort, I found her stories of her book tour a very good example of those I've been on from those with a big throng to those when nobody shows up. But more than that they way Susan reconnected with those from the past during her book tour was very courageous. And meeting the love of her life, who she coincidentally had purchased her farm from 24 years earlier, was the icing on the cake. As I turned the last page at 4:30 AM, I was so glad that Susan had the happily ever after she deserved. She is such a talented writer that I certainly hope she is able to gift her readers with more of her beautiful prose, whether it be in memoir or novel form. I will be first in line to buy it.

having so enjoyed Chosen By A Horse, Chosen Forever was even a braver and stronger memoir. I didn't want to put it down.

I read Chosen by a Horse several times and gave copies to many people, so when Richards came out with a second book, I was excited but a bit nervous. Would this be a sophomore effort, written quickly and thrown on the market? Imagine my relief, then, to actually read it. This book keeps the quiet, thoughtful, bare-bones-honest tone that I loved so much in her first book, but grants the reader a different--if equally powerful--look at the possibilities of transformation in life. Here is a woman who lived a relatively solitary existence of grief and healing and then, in her late fifties, becomes a New-York-Times-bestselling author in love with an internationally-renowned artist. I'm interested in that transformation and how someone of Richards' temperament handles it. It takes a talented writer like Richards to explore such an evolution without arrogance or artifice. I admire her ability to see the possibilities of change in such different situations--the rescue of a needy animal and the catapult to sudden fame and love--and to write of both so beautifully.

Susan Richards' fluid writing style gracefully transitions between the present -- the book tour readings in which she speaks from her precious and towering debut memoir, Chosen By A Horse -- and the ever-threatening past which looms darkly in the form of a very real sense that she doesn't belong and is undeserving of this praise for her writing, and then fears, what if no one should come (to a book reading)? Never forgotten in this her second book is the shining effect of her fallen horse heroes who, constantly share mind space in the stiller water moments of her daily life. Where human caregivers often abandoned her as a child, the horses carried her in those dark days following a second failed marriage. Although not untrammeled by her life's many despairing moments, Richards unexpectedly finds romance at one of her readings in the form of a man captivated by her as so many readers were by the sheer heart and inspiration found in the expression of the author toward her horse, Lay Me Down, in her debut memoir. Richards overcomes her self doubts and unbridled fears and embraces this man with a sense of destiny, as she explains it. And the way she ultimately chooses to her heart -- to both of theirs -- is through the comforts and smells and swishing tails of horses in a show barn while out on a casual date.