Phantom stallion is one of my favorites to reread. It has its inconsistencies but like you said the characters really make it. Also maybe this is just me but at times it feels like she wanted to write for an older audience but got shoehorned into middle school horse girl territory. Like when they explore darker themes- hell she nearly gets murdered at least twice. And when they talk about how her accident affected her and jake it always feels like they're alluding to a lot more memory loss and other side effects. And then the blame Jake put on himself and how seeing that changed him (I think he mentions nightmares? Maybe not)
oh she 100% wanted to write for an older audience
i recently read #22 wild honey which the best plotted, most engaging book of the series. and is dripping in resentment that it has to be kid approved
aside from all the violence and doublesided mentions of love and how death comes up in a dozen ways in this book, it's also the most hypocrital and hard to stomach the adults are in the whole series
something that i feel like is at the publisher's direction is that the adults in sam's life are never allowed to be wrong. sam's always the one at fault and no one ever calls wyatt, grace, or (eventually) bryanna on their unfair and sometimes even cruel treatment of sam. this is turned up to eleven in wild honey and it comes across as the character straining against the confines of the genre - it's so blatantly unfair that it feels pointed
trudy betrays sam without giving her the chance to come clean, no one holds trudy accountable for the horse even though she was just as culpable as sam and sam is forced to apologize to her. they all treat sam as if she's done something legitimately horrible. the way wyatt talks to her and how he calls her girl in this one makes me want to throw a chair at him. when all she's done is try and let a horse that she's seen with her own two eyes running free for over a year continue to do so. jake and trudy both could tell that while the horse has been wild for a while, she wasn't born wild but they still go along with sam's plan of letting her heal and then setting her back free
the fact that trudy didn't pull sam aside when she thought the horse might belong to former-cop what's his face and instead just told on her and said nothing when he was intimidating her is actually deranged. he was badgering and being cruel to sam, and jake and jen and the sheriff all said something and trudy didn't. then her dad blames her for jake getting angry enough at her being mistreated that he wanted to hit the former cop. the actions jake didn't even take are somehow her fault, but wyatt has no concern at all with the grown ass man, former cop who'd been harassing his daughter to the point that jake wanted to hit him?
the reason i like sam with jake so much is that she pushes back on him. he loves her but the accident did fuck him up fundamentally. he blames himself still years later even though sam doesn't at all, even though it would be easy for her to when she asked for his help and he didn't listen. when he treats her like a kid, when he's acting in way born of trauma that's unfair to her, when he's rude - she pushes back on him. she calls him out on it and doesn't let him get away with it and knows him better than anyone. when jake needed help with his manhood ceremony thing, when he needed someone he could be vulnerable with and trust, he picked sam. sam trusts him and is trusted by him and they love and respect each other and don't let the other get away with their worst impulses. jake is known as hard and tough and scary by their peers, but sam doesn't even really clock it. she can read his silences easily, she knows exactly what he'll say or do in certain situations. i think a lot about how it took over twenty books for sam to think of one friend from san francisco and how deeply she must have been intertwined with jake before she left and how easily they picked that friendship up again even after two years of physical distance
also the first time i read i also wondered at the memory loss things! she doesn't know so many things she's supposed to. but i think it's actually just a narrative device to explain things to the audience rather than a memory loss thing, especially because they never bring up that sam has any sort of side effects or complications from her fall. which makes her dad keeping her away for two years even worse. she gets hints of being angry about being sent away, but they're shoved back down as soon as they appear
