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

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Although I am not a horse person I enjoyed Cooper’s other novels but this one I found boring and hard to get through.

We're reacquainted with characters from previous books, meet new ones and shake hooves with the fabulous Mrs Wilkinson. Captivating vast crowds as she progresses from point-to-point to major races, she brings fame and fortune to the syndicate, until, at last, she is entered in the greatest jump race of them all. I also know that I will be scooped up into a world where Jilly examines relationships, social considerations and class differences.

Also, the description inside the sleeve tells you EVERYTHING that happens up until about 650 pages in, so that was, rather, a suspense killer. I would like to offer my congratulations for yet another outstanding book that had me reading for almost 24 hours non-stop, often arriving at work with tired red eyes from reading into the early hours. I know the stories are great and romantic and rolicking and sexy, but honestly Jilly, I want more of the good stuff and less of the dross. In this novel her characters are more like stereotypes, the successful business man or the ruthless horse owner willing to do anything to win. Etta Bancroft – sweet, kind, still beautiful – adores racing and harbours a crush on one of its stars, the handsome high-handed owner-trainer Rupert Campbell-Black.

In recent years, she's succumbed to the lure of melodrama, and her books have become correspondingly more overblown and baggier.Jilly is at her best when she mixes her existing characters with new characters and tells stories of their lives and involvement in this horse world. Only through sheer determination and constant complaining did I finish this diabolical excuse for a book! Her clear thrill in racing can be seen in passages showing the excitement of race day - especially the biggest race of all, the Grand National. Mrs Wilkinson become a star - nicknamed 'the People's Pony', she is beloved by the crowds as she progresses from point-to-points to the major meetings and brings fame and fortune to the syndicate. Ridden by Rupert’s god daughter Amber Lloyd-Foxe, Mrs Wilkinson starts winning – and then bad things start happening.

In the late 1970s she published a guide to the subject that elaborated on Mitford's famous list of upper class "U" and "non-U terms". 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.

Despite the ballooning cast lists and increasingly febrile plots, she remains adept at bringing these people to such glittering, thrusting life that they feel almost real. However, I find myself not minding this, since it is a commonly used story (I've read similar from other books by Jilly, to those written by Fiona Walker, right through to the Black Stallion novels by Walter Farley). The pace varies throughout the book, I felt that at times it plodded along beautifully giving the characters time to develop and then with the turn of a page it would begin to pick up and race along for a while before steadying back down. 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. Alas, the story is not as much of a colossus as Rupert Campbell-Black is said to be in his character description.

Admittedly, I only started this book because it was available on overdrive, and I am aware and ashamed of my tendency to disparage contemporary romance novels. It's a sprawling tale with a huge ensemble cast, including several very familiar to fans (yes, Rupert Campbell-Black makes an appearance) and a raft of new faces, and a vast array of animals with their own distinctive character. Only to be surprised and let down by the sudden and out-of-tone scenes in the middle of the book, featuring drunken threesomes/foursomes, and then disgusted at the lightly-portrayed rape of an underage character, and the complete lack of depth and resolution to it throughout the entire rest of the book.So I do really wish Jilly had cut a third of the characters and quite a few of the goings-on, to increase the ratio of enjoyment to effort for the casual reader who wants to pick the novel up at the end of a day and sink in, without having to consult charts of who's who. Missing her dog and her home, she stumbles on a grey filly, starving and near to death in the woods. When her bullying husband dies, Etta's selfish, ambitious children drag her from her lovely Dorset house to live in a hideous modern bungalow in the Cotswold village of Willowwood. From wild parties at Newbury and Ludlow, to an overnight of musical beds at Stratford, to the thrills and spills of the Cheltenham Gold Cup, one fling leads to another and another.