A Fan's Playground

When I was a kid I read endless books about horses, just so many of them. And in my experience there are a few main categories of horse book. There's the books that focus on the relationship between a girl and a horse (or more rarely, a boy and a horse), there's the books that are about horses (especially wild/feral horses) doing their horse things from a horse pov, there's the books about friendships and rivalries between girls who love horses, and there's the books about racing.

Mostly I got these books from the library, but the other day I was nostalgically inspired to reread a couple of the ones I own.

Summer Pony, by Jean Slaughter Doty

This is a typical example of horse book type #1. It's a cute sweet short novel about a girl who loves horses who gets to rent a pony for the summer! At first she's embarrassed by how scraggly, oddly-coloured, and malnourished the pony Mokey looks, but she takes good care of Mokey and eventually realizes all of her good qualities, and also becomes good friends with the other girl in her neighbourhood who has a pony, and they have good times doing pony things together. And then at the end of the book she gets to keep Mokey forever, instead of returning her to the stable owner who clearly neglected her! Delightful.

Born to Race, by Blanche Chenery Perrin

This one is an example of type #4 with pretensions to include features of type #1 but doesn't really succeed at that. Born to Race is about a girl who grows up on a Thoroughbred racing farm, and when her favourite of her father's horses has a promising filly named Whickery, Suzy stays as involved as she can in Whickery's growth and development, both because she loves Whickery and because she really believes Whickery can win the big races.

Not as good as Summer Pony, as it's far more interested in expositioning to the reader about the facts of horse development and the racing industry than getting the reader emotionally invested in story or character.

Suzy seems emotionally distanced from the realities of the horses she supposedly loves, she seems more interested in them as toys than as real animals. And she is pretty condescending to the girl who's supposedly her best friend! I don't like Suzy as a protagonist.

I also think the ending sequence goes too quickly, from when Whickery finally starts racing to when she wins her big race, so that the ending, which ought to be the emotional climax of all that's previously happened in the book, doesn't have its full impact.

But I still have a lot of nostalgic fondness for it.