I never was one of those horse-loving girls when I was a kid of a girl growing up in West Texas. Most of my friends loved horses, wanted to ride horses, longed to own their own horse(s), aspired to become veterinarians or barrel racers when they grew up. Not me. I went horseback riding once or twice, but it wasn’t my thing. I didn’t read horse books or study horse breeds or talk about horses with my friends. I was just not horse-crazy.

And I’m not sure The Rose Legacy, a new book by Jessica Day George, would have appealed to me back then. Ms. George, author of The Castle series about a magical castle and its inhabitants, has crafted a lovely fantasy set in a world where the horses are supposed to be extinct and forbidden and dangerous. But they’re not any of those things, really.

Anthea Cross-Thornley has no parents and has been shunted about from one uncaring relative to another for all of her life as far as she can remember. But now she is being sent to the home of an uncle she never knew she had, her father’s brother, and what’s worse, her uncle’s home, called The Last Farm, is outside The Wall in the Exiled Lands where only outlaws and wild animals live. How can Anthea become a Rose Maiden to the queen of Coronam when she is being sent to hinterlands, and will she even survive if it’s true that diseases were spread by the exiles and the horses that used to live in the Exiled Lands?

So, of course, the Exiled Lands turn out to be much different from what Anthea has been led to believe, and The Rose Legacy turns out to be a book about magical horses and about magical communication between horses and humans and about bonding with animals and as most good fantasy is, about a quest to save the kingdom. If you like horses or quests or magical worlds, you should give this one a try. Even an old horse-indifferent reader like me enjoyed the story. It had some good, tense moments, an unexpected villain, and a nice resolution, although I read hints that The Rose Legacy may be the first book in a new series. If so, horse lovers everywhere will be delighted.

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This book also may be nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.