The Pony Book Chronicles

The Horse Who Lived Upstairs (1944)

2012-01-27T23:51:00.001-05:00

It's been an odd little winter so far. Unlike the past 3 years, it's been mild (notwithstanding an ice storm on Halloween, that is...) and really only one snowfall in 2012. And it was 60 today, a morning to startle you awake when you blow out the door late for work and having to walk the dog first and discover - warmth. No coat, no hat, no gloves, no mittens warmth.

This time last week it was much different. The sky that's a lovely if windy blue tonight was white last Friday night, snow clouds obscuring everything. And we woke on Saturday to a perfect white snowfall that was turning quickly to a freezing drizzle, coating the inch of snow with a hard, slick crust. The dog did not appreciate this, as she had to break through with every step, and our walk was extremely slow. I was estatic. I'm torn, on most weekends, between blissful sloth and the nagging urge I should be GETTING MORE DONE, and inclement weather relieves me of that burden; I couldn't go Out, it was Snowing. So there.

I spent most of the weekend hanging at the window, watching the birds at the bird feeder. Even the cardinals, who have been largely indifferent to the feeders since kicking junior out of the nest (they spent much of the late summer patiently flying from feeder to teen cardinal, stuffing seeds into him) reappeared. Dog and family both became inured to squawks like "The nuthatches! The nuthatches!" and "Wrens! There were wrens!" The dog is only interested in the feeders as far as I sometimes throw stale bread out there, and the family was only briefly interested when I happily announced that a hawk had just come by (and missed), executing a hairpin turn directly in front of the window. That hawk and I seem bound on a collision course; he blew by me by a few feet last week, having apparently mistaken a bit of dog fur I was sweeping off the sidewalk for something tasty.

The Horse Who Lived Upstairs

Phyllis McGinley, il. Helen Stone

1944, J.B. Lippincott Company

There was once a horse named Joey who was discontented.

A city horse, Joey lives in a highrise, drinks from an old bathtub, pulls a vegetable cart and longs for the country life.

"This is no life for a horse," he used to say to the Percheron who lived in the next stall to him. "We city horses don't know what real living is. I want to the move to the country and sleep in a red barn with a weathervane on top, and kick up my heels in a green meadow."

But when Joey gets his chance at a rural idyll, he learns that there are unexpected drawbacks, and that he may just be a city horse at heart.

A wonderful pairing of energetic illustration and wistful writing, and that eternal favorite them of where home is. My beloved old copy appears above, which explains the various blots and scratches. It's on the fragile side. I remember reading this book as a child and being utterly captivated by the fact there were horses living in a building. Neat! And, of course, the city itself was fascinating. All those old children's books where New York was the star, all tantalizing.

Other Books (childrens')
The Horse Who Had His Picture In The Paper - sequel (wheee! I didn't realize this existed)
The Plain Princess
The Most Wonderful Doll In The World

About the Author
1905-1978
A poet who wrote children's stories and articles about gardening, a Pulitzer Prize winner who lived happily in the suburbs, and a feminist whose affection for a traditional persona vexed roughly the same percentage of people as it pleased, McGinley seems to have enjoyed herself thoroughly. Several sources mention a childhood spent on the move, often in less-than-cushy rural circumstances, and that would seem to illuminate the presentation of a less-than-idyllic country life in this book.

About the Illustrator
1903-1978?
I didn't find much about Helen Stone, only a snippet on Google Books from Something About The Author, indicating that she was a friend of McGinley's who brought over some horse drawings one day, as inspiration for a poem. She was, however, an art school graduate who'd studied in Paris, although it seems that this was her first book.

Links
2008 NYT article about McGinley
cover of Time magazine, June 18, 1965
Blog Mrs. Sandusky Reads! with post about Helen Stone (Mrs. Sandusky also has posts on pony book author Lavinia R. Davis (both non-horsey, one for Roger And The Fox); a 12-year-old Caldecott winner for The Good-Luck Horse
Ask Art Helen Stone
The Children's Literature Research Collection on Helen Stone

Lone Hunter’s Gray Pony (1956)

2012-01-21T19:33:00.000-05:00

Lone Hunter’s GrayPony

Donald Worcester, il. Paige Pauley

1956, Oxford University Press

1985, A Sundance Book, Texas Christian University Press(shown)

The gray pony snortedonce more, then relaxed. His head hadbeen held high; now it was lowered and stretched out toward Lone Hunter, sothat the boy was able to stroke the broad forehead. In a few minutes the pony was rubbing hissoft, black nose against the boy’s chest while Lone Hunter scratched hisblack-tipped ears.

Oglala Sioux warrior Red Eagle has returned triumphant froma raiding party on the Pawnee with a mount for his son, Lone Hunter, who hasbeen yearning to join the buffalo hunters. Lone Hunter immediately begins training his beautiful gray pony to thetricks of being a warrior’s horse – galloping alongside running prey andleaping away to safety the moment he hears an arrow twang – even as hepractices the skills of a hunter and warrior. His great bond with Gray Ponyproves to be an advantage when Lone Hunter falls in front of buffalo – and thepony doesn’t bolt to safety but waits for him.

By the beginning of the fall buffalo hunt, boy and pony areready and waiting for permission from Red Eagle. Only one thing worries Lone Hunter; in asociety where horse theft is a mark of great bravery and honor, the tribesalways bring their valuable horses into the camp each night for safety. Only the old, slow horses ridden by childrenand women are left outside. Lone Hunterhas been leaving Gray Pony outside the camp rather than face mockery orquestion – why should a boy’s pony be tended carefully?

When the pony is stolen by Kiowas, Lone Hunter risks death,entering the hostile lands of that tribe to find and steal back Gray Pony.

A short, simply and well-written book which easily andeffectively blends an adventure story with interesting background on the OgalaSioux, particularly their remarkable horsemanship:

LoneHunter took the heavy bow in his left hand. It was beautifully made, ideal for use on horseback, and any warriorwould be glad to have one as good. Hestraightened his left arm and, by straining hard, pulled the sinew bowstringnearly to his ear with his right hand.

"Itis yours, my son,” said Red Eagle. “Idid not know your arms were so strong. But you must be able to draw it many times without tiring, while ridingat full speed across rough ground, before you talk of hunting the buffalo.”

Sequels
Lone Hunter And TheCheyennes
Lone Hunter’s FirstBuffalo Hunt
Lone Hunter And TheWild Horses

Links
Texas Tech University, Southwest Collection/SpecialCollections Library
Texas A&M University Press Consortium
Portrait of Al Zirr at Fine Art America
Maud W. Makemson's bio at Vassar

Other edition
1961 original cover at Amazon

About the Author

(1915- )
Donald Emmett Worcester was born in Arizona but raisedlargely on a farm in southern California, at the edge of the Mojave Desert. His parents were divorced; his father wandered in and out of his children's lives, while their mother struggled as a rare female astronomist trying to make it in academia (see thoroughly interesting link above). After serving in theNavy, was a history professor at the University of Florida and Texas ChristianUniversity. He was president of theWestern Writers of America (1973-1974). The dust jacket of the 1985 edition says he's retired and enjoying writing and raising Arabian horses, and owns Al Zirr, a son of Cass Ole, the black Arabian who starred in the film version of The Black Stallion.

Books (nonfiction)

The Apaches: Eagles OfThe Southwest
Pioneer Trails West
Brazil: From Colony ToWorld Power
Forked Tongues AndBroken Treaties
Cowboy With A Camera:Erwin E. Smith, Cowboy Photographer
The Texas Longhorn:Relic Of The Past, Asset For The Future
The Three Worlds OfLatin America
The Chisholm Trail
The Texas Cowboy
Kit Carson: MountainScout
John Paul Jones:Soldier Of The Sea
The Weapons OfAmerican Indians
Early History of TheNavaho Indians
The Spanish Mustang

Books (fiction)

War Pony
Brazos Scout
Man On Two Ponies
Gone To Texas
Western Horse Tales

Other writing

Apparently did a Spanish translation of Lois Lenski’s Cowboy Small.
A Visit From Father and Other Tales Of The Mojave (memoir)

About the Artist
I was unable to find anything about Paige Pauley, but I had to mention the illustrations, which enhance the book.

Black Beauty at Chick-Fil-A

2012-01-15T23:40:00.001-05:00

Black Beauty

Chick-Fil-A edition
Anna Sewell, il. Jose Miralles
Abridged by Margo Lundell
2007, Frederic Thomas Inc.

The last post was about a horsey book which strove to educate children about sexual abuse. This one is about a slim booklet which is arguably even more didactic, although in all fairness it heavily abridged a book which was conceived as an educational tool, the classic Black Beauty.

Stories like Black Beauty are fun to read and think about, but they can also teach us about the world and ourselves. Black Beauty is a great story to teach us about the word respect. Respect means that we treat others in a way that we would like to be treated. You can learn more about respect by trying to understand what Black Beauty may be thinking or feeling, and how he views the world.

Lundell, who adapted Sewell's work for this little version, does a nice job considering the limitations and the intended audience.

I was very ill. I had a bad inflammation of the lungs and could not breathe without pain. John nursed me day and night. The master often came to see me, too. "My poor Beauty," he said during one visit. "You saved your mistresses's life, Beauty, you did."

I will admit, I really included this review, if it can be called a review, only because I like the illustrations, by comic book artist Miralles, but I was unable to find much about him online, at least in the time frame I alloted and given my decision in high school to take French instead of Spanish (a decision I soon regretted, as the French teacher was an evil hag and the Spanish teacher was a likeable sort of guy). So I came up blank on a post re: Mr. Miralles's artwork. It is impressive, however; horses are not easy to draw and his are quite realistic.

Happily, as has happened before, my research for the post lead me on to more topics. The fast-food chain Chick-Fil-A distributed these books with its kids meals, a nice habit it seems to be continuing now with Little Golden Books. The company was founded by a Southern Baptist who isn't shy about his religious faith, and their charitable work with children's causes is counter-balanced by a support for anti-gay causes. So there's some positive/negative issues there.

More interesting to me is the discovery that MacDonald's, the ultimate fast-food joint, has now glommed onto giving away books with Happy Meals instead of toys. At least, in the UK. The french fry giant is collaborating with HarperCollins UK to give away 9 million books from War Horse author Michael Morpurgo.

And now I want a chicken sandwich. And a large fries. Damnit.

Links

FredericThomas Inc.

Promise Not To Tell (1985)

2012-01-12T20:49:00.000-05:00

Promise Not To Tell

Carolyn Polese, il. Jennifer Barrett

1985, Human Sciences Press

Today she was going toride a real horse again. And today, ifshe got to the stables early enough to help saddle up, Walt said he’d give heran extra, secret lesson on Charlotte. Walt said that way Meagan would be sure to pass the Trail Trials onFriday.

I disapprove of using fiction as a thinly veiled therapeutictool. However, this one is well writtenso although it was clearly intended only as a way to educate children aboutsexual abuse – it’s very brief, the entire plot is the abuse and it’s obviouslynot a general read - it is hard todismiss it too summarily.

Under the pines andspruce, the campground was cool, but Meagan could tell, by the spicy smell inthe air, that it would be hot as soon as she was out in the open.

One reason I’m including it here is that it’s the only horsebook I’ve ever found which deals with sexual abuse at the barn. That’s always struckme as odd, considering that the horse hobby is famously popular with children. Horse books tendto present “the barn” as a haven. That’svery nice and often very true, but the prejudice that barn=good must be a bit hardon anyone who experiences something different there.

One line devastatingly sums up the cunning of a child molester, and the innocence of the victim:

The nicest thing aboutWalt, Meagan thought, was that he was always glad to see her.

Links

Author’s website (her name is now Carolyn Lehman)

Illustrator’s website (she's now Jennifer O’Connell)

The Christopher Awards

About the author, etc.

The book won an award from The Christophers, a Catholic-founded group which recognizes positive effort.

An organization founded in 1945 by a Maryknoll priest, TheChristophers mission statement reads in part:

Themission of The Christophers is to encourage people of all ages, and from allwalks of life, to use their God-given talents to make a positive difference inthe world. The mission is best expressed in The Christophers’ motto: “It’sbetter to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”

A Girl Called Bob & A Horse Called Yoki (1982)

2012-01-04T00:06:00.002-05:00

A Girl Called Bob & A Horse Called Yoki
Barbara Campbell
1982, The Dial Press

Next I stop at Yoki’s grocery two stores down from Jenkins’s Bake Shop. Yoki’s is named after a horse, and that horse is a friend of mine. He pulls the milk-delivery wagon every morning, and after he finishes, he lives out back of the store in a broken-down woodshed.

Eight-year-old Barbara Ann “Bob” lives in St. Louis during the Second World War. Her father is in the Pacific and her mother is working long hours, but her harsh grandmother, Sweetmama, is living with them. Sweetmama is a hard woman to please, and when her fear of cats provokes her to hurt Bob’s cat Sauce, Bob hates her. But Bob adores a neighbor’s horse:

He just stands there and blows through his lips. I’m crazy about this horse. He doesn’t remind me of any horse in the movies. He doesn’t clippity, cloppity fast and his tail doesn’t swish. He’s very slow, with big hooves that have hair hanging over them. He’s got a dip in his back and a little stubby tail. But he’s got a beautiful face.

When Yoki’s owner falls ill, his nephew arrives to take charge of the grocery and quickly decides to send the old horse off to be slaughtered.

“It’s not fair that Yoki is going to be killed for glue,” I say. “Every time I turn around, somebody being killed. They’re killing people in the war and that’s all you hear on the radio, and now they’re killing Yoki for no reason except they don’t want him anymore.”

Bob, already dealing with a difficult grandmother, fear for her father’s safety, and worry over her upcoming baptism, focuses on saving her friend from the glue factory.

An unusual book. For one thing, there aren't too many African-American heroines in horsey lit. For another, even for a period piece it's unusual that Bob's troubles with her sometimes cruel grandmother are resolved realistically, not dramatically. Finally, despite a generally high quality of writing, the author doesn't seem to have written other books. She appears to have been a reporter, and this book seems autobiographical, as she grew up in Saint Louis.

Other editions:
1986 Harper Trophy paperback with the title Taking Care Of Yoki. Shown below. Cover art by Sheila Hamanaka.

About the author
1939-
A journalist who grew up in Saint Louis and ended up in New York City. Extremely elusive online.

Three Wild Ones (1963)

2011-12-26T22:48:00.001-05:00

Three Wild Ones
John Reese
1963, The Westminster Press

The grey went on thealert. He lifted his head. His ears shot forward curiously, then werelaid back flat on his head in angry defiance. He bunched his four feet and stood trembling, ready to stroke or kick orrun.

16-year-old Art Byfield runs away from his Nebraska homeafter another argument with his new stepfather. Hotly resentful of his mother’s remarriage and bored with his life, Arthits the road with little more than the shirt on his back. Eleven days later, he’s in southernCalifornia. He’s cold, hungry,frightened by the violence and hardness of life on the road, and still not readyto go home. He stumbles across a smallhorse ranch owned by cantankerous old Grover Henry “Yuma” Schoonover, andsettles in as a much-bawled-out stable hand.

Up until this point, the book is hard going. It has a violent, disturbing core that’s evidentfrom the first paragraph:

When they pulled outof the drive-in hamburger stand at one thirty A.M., the other car emergedthrough thick shadows down the road to follow them. Art Byfield felt heavy dread as well as hotanger as he glanced from the rearview mirror to the sleepy, golden-haired girlwho sat between him and Piddy Kern. Noquestion now – those three fellows were following him, hoping to pick upsomebody else’s pretty girl.

It’s a scene to make any woman’s skin crawl, being followedhome after midnight by men half drunk and wholly nasty. It’s followed quickly by more hardscrabblescenes where Ar t runs afoul of criminals, including Yuma, who immediatelytells him he’s an ex-con who went to prison for manslaughter, and threatens himwith a broken bottle.

Then Art, who has only had a mild interest in horses before,becomes interested in the grey colt Hickey, a shy and wild horse Yuma hasexpressly told him to leave alone. Theslow, understandable work of handling horses is a comfort to the reader and toArt, after the random, chaotic world of the criminals who have untilnow dominated the book. They continue toappear – Art and Yuma tangle with a killer, and Art forms a wary friendshipwith a local deputy – but the emphasis shifts over to horses.

Yuma’s horses are movie horses. Sam, a big bay gelding, is a natural ham wholoves the camera and who is recruited to work on a new Western series. When Yuma is hurt, Art takes over the job of hauling the horses to the set every day, and begins to consider stunt riding and horse training as a career.

Animals

Hickey – grey colt
Ritzy – 15-year-old bay mare
Sam – 11-year-old bay gelding
Pancho - buckskin gelding
Daisy – 6-year-old Thoroughbred-cross mare
Lottie – 6-year-old mare

Author

John Henry Reese (1910-1981) mostly wrote Westerns, but afew children/teen books in the 1960s, including a dog book, Big Mutt, which I reviewed on my dog blog and liked very much.

In other news.
Christmas was a beautiful and balmy 50 degrees, my year-old review of Helga Sandburg's Blueberry has been updated with a cover image, and I have finally convinced birds to use the newest feeder.

Purple finches!!!

Updated illustrations, Black Beauty, Phoebe Erickson and gardening

2011-12-15T00:32:00.000-05:00

It would appear - how embarassing - that I did not actually post the review of Balch's book this past summer. I wrote it and then saved it. Ah, well. Once I get that review off the old computer, I can reunite it with the illustrations.

I have figured out how to update previous posts, so the reviews of Star Dream, High Hurdles and Horse Show Hurdles should now feature their covers and interior illustrations where possible.

And now, for some pictures. First, an entry from one of those multi-book anthologies of classic children's books. Three guesses which book this shiny black horse goes to.

The interiors are by Phoebe Erickson, who wrote a few horse books (Black Penny, Wildwing) in addition to illustrating the books of others.

I've never been quite able to decide if I like her art or not. Her illustrations sometimes seem to hover between warm and cartoonish.

I like these black and white drawings, though.

And a celebration of my garden, taken by the first frost this past November. The idle pleasures of watering have now been subsumed by thesomewhat more aerobic acitvity of raking leaves.

Coleus, which surprised me by growing large enough to be a small bush. A very small bush, true, but I regard any appreciable plant growth as nothing short of miraculous when it's done beneath a massive oak tree.

A plant and a toy. Does gardening get better than making snapdragons bite?

A portulacca, one of several which revelled in this summer's brutal heat. They did not especially enjoy the heavy rains that started in August, however, and were essentially washed away.

Catching up

2011-12-12T22:04:00.015-05:00

I'm having a little bit of an argument with the new computer, which charmed me by uploading 900 photos in 3 minutes and then picked a fight by refusing to let me edit older posts. So here are covers from the most recently reviewed books.

Scarcely worth it, between the quality of the art and the fact they're both hard-used library bindings. But here are the cover and some interior illustration from a review from last summer, Glenn Balch's Horse Of Two Colors.

I really do think Lorence Bjorklund is one of the best, if least-known, American illustrators.

High Hurdles (1955) (mini review)

2011-12-03T10:14:00.009-05:00

Dria Meredith is back home in Hilton, Indianna when her glamorous, wealthy grandmother blows into town and announces she'll be paying for Dria to train with her now 4-year-old horse, Star Dream to compete in the National Horse Show in New York City. In November.

"The National Horse Show!" Mama cried. "New York with Star Dream! Winning prizes! Acclaim!"

Dria reacts as if her grandmother had shot her pony with a bazooka.

"Oh, Mama." Dria realized what this foolish, expensive venture would cost. It wasn't worth it, not even if she wanted to go to New York, which she didn't.

More importantly, it means poor Dria will have to give up her dreams of editing the school newspaper with her boyfriend. Yes, you read that right. Dria and her whipped/obsessive boyfriend Rob -

He had spent the morning pursuing Dria; and since he expected to continue the exercise for months and years to come, one day was much like another.

- were to have spent a cozy senior year snuggled up in the newspaper office at the local high school. And now she has to spend long, cold hours at the barn training for the National Horse Show!!!!!

Needless to say, Dria makes it to the Garden, where of course Star Dream is a success. Confusing matters somewhat is Dria's cousin Camilla Lou, who crashes the week-long event for the society side. Bored with the horses, she has an eye for the men of the international teams and talks her way into the official stadium boxes of the Canadian team.

"Now, how did she ever find her way in there?" Mama had to ask... "Those boxes are reserved!"
"Well, she isn't." Dria made the statement because she had been at the horse show for the better part of a week and had never thought of seating herself there.

Considering that Dria's endless self-effacement and heroic self-sacrifice are always being rewarded with horses, free trips to huge horse shows, male adoration, parental fawning, etc., etc., you'd think she could spot her cousin one measly flirtation.

More troubling for Dria, however, is that Star Dream's success in class after class has attracted attention and sale offers. And although her great-grandmother, Dream's legal owner, is perfectly in sync with Dria and has no particular wish to sell her horse, Dria's relentless selflessness makes her aware that a sale would make financial sense for the elderly woman.

This is the third in the series, after Star Dream and Summer For Seven, which I completely skipped. I will do my best to get to it, but since I really just skimmed this one, I have my doubts as to whether the review will be any more reverent. The heroine and Lambert just set my teeth on edge.

Random commentary:
Inter-library loan is an amazing thing. One of my recent requests came to my New Jersey library from Alaska. For one dollar, the public libraries of America sent an elderly children's book roughly 3,400 miles.

I love red-tailed hawks. The muscle cars of the sky, they're highly visible and unmistakable, which is nice for the lazy sort of birdwatcher who really doesn't enjoy parsing out the difference between the Carolina and the Black-Capped Chickadee. And their scream is the eagle/hawk cry of a million movies, instantly evoking images of high plains drifters, cowboys, buttes and the wilderness.

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/red-tailed_hawk/sounds

Star Dream (1951)

2011-10-30T22:39:00.012-04:00

Star Dream
Janet Lambert, il.
1951, E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc.

Dria's second evening at Lane Acres was unlike any she ever had spent. Due to a sudden summer rain, the whole family gathered in the parlors, and it was as if an electric wire had come loose and hung swinging in the middle of the room, with everyone skirting it, not knowing how dangerous it was. Great-Gran was the live wire that people warily avoided. Emily St. John sat on a green velvet love seat and looked at the contented old lady as if she would like to nip her off with a pair of pliers and carry her gingerly outside.

Alexandria "Dria" Meredith has been sent from her Indiana home to her great-grandmother's Virginia farm for the summer, as her parents Alexander and Elizabeth are going to the Mayo Clinic to cure her sick mother. Dria dreads the trip, as it means entering a simmering family feud that started yeas ago when her father walked away from the family factory to become a newspaperman. In residence at the farm near Lexington, Virginia, are Dria's great-grandmother Gran, her grandmother Mama, her aunt Emily, her cousin Camilla Lou, and a few employees, including the friendly handyman her own age, Chad. Dria quickly learns to adore her frail, outspoken Gran, but can't quite handle the other women of the family, whose existing loyalties and battles baffle her. She spends much of her time with Chad, learning to train the brown colt she names Star Dream.

The brown colt stood still with his little pointed ears up, his beautiful head lifted, his dainty unshod feet with their two white fore socks firmly planted. He looked like a bronze statue; and Dria knew he felt as she often had when she waited at an appointed place for her mother, watching pedestrians who were never the right person.

Dria impulsively begs her grandmother, who's selling off all her horses because she's broke, to keep the colt through the summer and let her train him, so he'll fetch a higher price. Gran, who's formed an instant fondness for Dria that rouses the ire of the rest of the household, indulgently agrees. The handyman, Tom, trains Dria to ride and teachers her how to train her colt. Dria has no worries about training, but finds riding a bit more frightening at first.

Sitting on Pokey was like sitting on a merry-go-round horse between rides, for she had no interest in the affair at all. She took a nap while Tom pushed Dria's blue jeaned thighs into the saddle, shoved down her heels and got her at a better angle. She even started off in slow motion. Dria had plenty of time to devote to herself; to watch her reins, keep her elbows in, her wrists flexed, her toes in, too, her back arched, shoulders relaxed, heels down, head up. The only trouble was, she had to do it with Tom walking and talking beside her, and he kept adding to her list before she had time to practice anything he said.

While I love the descriptions of Dria learning to ride - her first lesson passes "like a whole morning of spankings" - I'm ambivalent about the book. I've tried reading Lambert's books before - she wrote over 50, mostly teen novels - and been stymied by something elderly in their philosophy. Here, Dria nearly turns herself inside out with self-recrimination when she has a minor quarrel with her cousin, and several times all but begs her great-grandmother to sell Star Dream in order to keep family harmony. The argument between her father and his mother, a long-standing family feud that's obviously a clash between two strong-willed adults, is aggressively portrayed as being entirely the mother's fault; when peace comes, it comes because she capitulates. The female-only family Dria's grandmother has created - with her own mother, her daughter Emily and her grand-daughter Camilla Lou - is a failure, rife with acrimony and bitter scheming, while Alex's little family of wife Elizabeth and daughter Alexandria, is perfect. The mother is graciously invisible even in near-death from an illness that's never named (I assumed, based on the dying-while-fragile descriptions and some vague comments about her having surgery in the chest area, that it was either tuberculosis or cancer), and of course, little Alexandria is filled to the brim with energy and brightness, with the feminine grace of being wholly concerned with the welfare of others.

Other issues detract from the pleasure of the book. The POV is unsteady, jumping sometimes without warning from Dria, who is the usual narrator, to others and then back. Lambert clearly had a strong affection for the place - she lived in Lexington, and her fondness for it shows through - but she doesn't do much to describe the physical surroundings. Though, come to that, she also doesn't describe her characters much. This could be considered a good thing, as old teen novels have a weakness for awkward moments where the heroine's cunning hat or sparkling eyes are lovingly detailed, but it would be nice to have some idea of what anyone looks like.

The strengths? A strong major character (she's strong, just a little crazy when it comes to self-sacrifice), a forceful plot, and a convincing dilemma. Star Dream doesn't quite count as a horse book - despite the horsey content, it's just not really about the horses - but it's quite powerful as a teen novel. It handles the confusion of an extremely complicated mesh of family members (three with nearly identical names) to show a teenager grappling with family dynamics in a clan where the money and the power reside in different people.

Illustrations
The actual cover can be seen at Jane Badger Books (http://www.janebadgerbooks.co.uk/usa/lambert.html) or at Image Cascade
(http://www.imagecascade.com/dria-meredith-stories.html) which reprinted the books around 2000. My copy, acquired through interlibrary loan, is lacking a dust jacket. There is only one illustration, a black-and-white drawing on the title page which makes Dria look about 17 although I believe she's supposed to be about 14 in this book and behaves like an unusually serious-minded 11-year-old most of the time.

The Dria series
Star Dream (1951)
Summer For Seven (1952)
High Hurdles (1955)

Etc.

2011-10-29T16:40:00.010-04:00

This is how late October is supposed to look in NJ - the leaves of a few trees, mostly the maples, flaming out suddenly, the rest starting to turn and fall. Coolness, a sudden chill in the morning. Realizing that the humid, oppressive jungle of summer insects and plant life is gone, that even the insects that are still around and the plants that are still thriving both look thinner, weaker. The earth and the water, covered for months in flowers and leaves and vines and ants and beetles, revealed again, heading back toward winter's stark mass.

Today's sleet, on the other hand, and nor'easter, are atypical and not altogether welcome. I love a rainy, sleepy Saturday more than the average person - I'd rather curl up inside and snooze when it rains, instead of thrashing my way back and forth to Philadelphia, and work. But sleet? Sleet? I was just adjusting to the end of summer, and winter is already here.

It doesn't seem to be bothering the birds much; they staged a protest out at the feeders, complaining that there was nothing there for them, until I relented and stuck my head out long enough to rip a day-old French bread apart and throw it out. A couple hours later, there was a flock plus a fat grey squirrel prospecting in the weeds for stray crumbs. Somewhere, the black cat who's convinced the feeder is actually being manned for his convenience is dreaming of the rain stopping and his paws wrapping around some bird's neck. A few feet from the computer, my dog is dreaming of finding the black cat and being his best friend. She loves cats but cats do not generally realize that her attempts to run right over to them are meant to be friendly.

Thanks to the joys of interlibrary loan, I've gotten my hands on two old horse books, Janet Lambert's Star Dream (1951) and High Hurdles (1955). I've been reading the first, which is very enjoyable but sometimes very odd. As in many older books, the female protagonist's age is difficult to discern; she is old enough to date (a little) and be aware of her parents' troubles, but her artlessness makes for an unconvincing teenager. And I still haven't recovered from the scene where she suddenly refers to the the Soviet Union's NKVD; coming midway through a book whose tone and setting are gently, vaguely prewar, the modern reference is yelp-inducing.

Draw With Same Savitt

I've acquired a few more books, notably Suzanne Wilding's The Book of Ponies, illustrated by Sam Savitt. The book herd is rapidly approaching critical mass, and as we're now rapidly approaching Christmas, I'm afraid the reckoning I've been postponing since July is also looming. Or I could just stick them all in the attic.

And now I need to go dig out some Halloween candy and have a little snack. Inspired by the frozen day, I spent two hours making a very bad chili for lunch (underspriced, over-tomatoed, generally a failure which might redeem itself in reheating) but now I have to tackle dinner. I would like to skip dinner and proceed directly to popcorn while watching the Lost Boys sequel, but that would probably be an unpopular decision with the rest of the household.

2011-09-12T00:16:00.003-04:00

Searching for more information about Charles Livingston Bull, the illustrator for Albert Payson Terhune’s books, I stumbled across a blog about the Old West in popular culture, Buddies In The Saddle. He has a review of an old book, The Untamed by George Pattulla (1911), which is a collection of stories where various animals, including horses and mules, are the main characters.

http://buddiesinthesaddle.blogspot.com/2011/01/george-pattullo-untamed-range-life-in.html

A more recent book is Hartslove by K.M Grant. I’ve flipped through Grant’s earlier books, but never really got into them. Her new one looks promising – the “and then my genteelly rich family put all their eggs into one racehorse basket” plot alone is worth a look.

http://ourbookreviewsonline.blogspot.com/2011/08/hartslove-by-km-grant.html

And here’s a piece from the blog Flash Fiction about a tongue-tied 10-year-old horse and book nut meeting Walter Farley in 1975.

http://lisavooght.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-dreams-come-true-post-for.html

And a review at For The Love Of Books of the Snow Man biography. I have to finish my copy, but the first few chapters were disappointing.

http://fortheloveofbooks-thebookgirl.blogspot.com/2011/08/hero-on-white-horse.html

And an interesting review of a new book I hadn’t heard about, G. Neri’s Ghetto Cowboy, based on Philadelphia’s Fletcher Street stables.

http://bufflehead.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/cowboy-attitude-interview-with-author-g-neri/

Another weekend, another book sale

2011-07-31T20:49:00.016-04:00

It's awf'lly bad luck on Diana,

Her ponies have swallowed their bits;

She's fished down their throats with a spanner

And frightened them all into fits.

Hunter Trials by John Betjeman; The Poetry of Horses, ed. William Cole

Friday night, I got a jump on the weekend and went book shopping at a charity sale held in the back of beyond. I came out, lugging 3 bags of ancient, stinking, flaking reading material and roughly $25 lighter, to find an enormous thunderhead looming. Cursing, I ran to the car and spent the next hour cautiously driving around the storm. This journey was made all the more interesting because I was not 100% sure where I was. I lucked out and managed to never be where the storm was raging at any given time, though I did drive through a few places where it had just drowned the roads and/or knocked down the trees.

But I made it back, as did the loot. They're a mixed bag; more amazing nonfiction selections (somebody must have contributed a lifetime library of racing books) and some tantalizing reeking-but-must-have fiction, and few elderly cookbooks. Which are another minor failing. I don't really cook, but I do like cookbooks.

Horse Fiction
Who, Sir? Me, Sir? by K.M. Peyton (which I've just re-read today and sigh)*
The Poetry Of Horses ed. William Cole*
The Valley Of The Ponies by Jean Slaughter Doty* one of her harder to locate books
Races To The Swift ed by Fairfax Downey - short racing stories

Horse Non-fiction
Horse Crazy by Bronwyn Llewellyn - a collection of essay about women and horses
The Equestrian Woman by Ann Martin - bios of women in different horse sports
The Boy Who Talks To Horses by Ivy Jackson Banks
Mark Phillips by by Angela Rippon
Olympic Vet by Joseph C. O'Dea - looks to be a very interesting read covering half the 20th century in equine sport
Women Of The Year by Jacqueline Duke (about racing fillies)
Women In Racing by John & Julia McEvoy
Forward Motion by Holly Menino

Non-Horse
Ordinary Jack by Helen Cresswell (which I promptly read, having always wanted to read this first of the Bagthorpe saga, which is not simple to locate in the US, and finally, finally finding out about Grandma's party and how it came to burn out the dining room)*

Stranger On The Bay by Adrien Stoutenburg - some sort of mystery for teens, looks promisingly old

Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapes by James Beard - which has this little DO from a guide to the cocktail party: DO know how many are coming and do know that they are congenial. Remember the Montagues and the Capulets and judge accordingly.

Big Mutt by John Reese- extremely battered dog book.

Wild Animal Man by Damoo Dhotre - a companion of sorts to the circus book I reviewed here one, Circus Doctor.

The Lost Pet Chronicles by Kat Albrecht

Betty Crocker's Guide To Easy Entertaining - oh, how I love this 1959 book; my old copy was in tatters, and this one is perfect. I've never actually cooked from it, the appeal lies in the sense it conveys of a world of serene, universally understood manners: A reasonable hour to leave after dinner is 11, or slightly earlier on a weekday. The good guest, asked for such an affair as tea from 5 to o7, does not linger after the later hour unless specifically invited to do so. Having all but dropped from exhaustion after hosting parties where guests simply refused to leave, I read these pages with a sense of hungry yearning.

Cooking With Soup: A Campbell Cookbook - Again, I will probably never cook from it but it was unthinkable to leave it behind, as I had family who worked for Campbell Soup when it still had factories in NJ, and I went to school in Camden, alongside the big, old buildings where the company originated. This sort of reasoning is why books are running amok in my house.

* These books are, unfortunately, stinkers. A local library is a sick building, one of those monolithic 1960s structures which appear to have been built either to prove that America too could produce Stalinist architecture or to withstand a direct nuclear blast. Concrete from head to toe, it hunkers into the ground, the only natural light coming from a small set of front doors which open not directly into the library but into a tunnel-like entryway, and a smattering of narrow horizontal windows set so high in the walls that they meet the roof. Which has deep eaves. The kicker is that this love song to damp was built in a low-lying area, so it's a mold's paradise. And the poor books smell of it. I've never met books which smelled worse. The fun part is this nightmare library is finally being replaced, and the librarians have been busy getting rid of old books. First they sold them at their own book sales - where I lost my head and bought 2 bags of them, which I clung to grimly for 2 months before admitting it was a lost cause and dumping them - and then, in the way used books circulate through an area, they've begun traveling in ever-increasing circles radiating out from their origins. This latest sale is the furthest I've found them, and I knew they were there the moment I walked in.

The perfect number of books

2011-07-20T23:17:00.006-04:00

What's the perfect number of books? Personally, I think it's exactly the amount you can cram into a house without sending any one floor crashing into the one below. I am not generally acquisitive; I can window-shop for ages, and leave stores without buying anything. Part of this is frugality, part is a deep horror of adding more possessions to my limited space. But this admirable self-control stems also from the unavoidable fact that much of that space is already filled with books. Books, most awkward and filthy of possessions, are my weakness.

And this weekend, I managed to add more, mostly nonfiction of the large and somewhat moldering variety. W. Menzendorf's Kavalkade, which is in German and of which I can understand exactly three words: "Hans," "Winkler," and "Halla." A strange, small Scholastic edition of Son Of The Black Stallion, in which Satan has a very odd look in his eye. I don't believe I've ever seen any Farley book put out in the smaller format. The Horseman's Bible by Jack Coggin, which I recall with great fondness, the sort of book which shows you exactly how to put on a bridle. Creative Horsemanship by Charles de Kunffy, a 1978 printing, which will go straight into my stack of books which I should read, and will do directly I finish both my sensible, balanced dinner and my core-strengthening exercise. Riding The International Way. Successful Show-Jumping by Daphne Machin Goodall. Show Jumper by Dorian Williams. Ruffian by Edward Claflin. And, most fun of all from the perspective of a pony book fan, Horsemanship For Beginners by Jean Slaughter, who as Jean Slaughter Doty would go on to write some of the very best American horse books - Summer Pony, The Crumb, The Monday Horses.

There will need to be evictions. There will need to be shuffling. But not until the heat breaks. Until then, I will huddle beside the air conditioner and read.

Etc.

2011-07-08T18:54:00.020-04:00

Sorry about the lack of illustrations on the preceeding review; I'm working on a borrowed computer while doing research to replace my latest deceased PC, and only using images I already had stashed on a flash drive. This blog may look more like a chamber of commerce ad for the Delaware Valley for a while, as local shots are what I have for illustration.

If, like me, you haven't gone on vacation in a while, here's a vicarious riding vacation in Iceland, courtesy of the Horse Breeders' Association of Iceland. Beautiful, but terrifyingly rocky terrain. When I fall off, I like to hit sand or soil, not stone.

http://www.icehorse-experience.is/en/video/ytri-ranga-3

(Also sorry about the generally low-tech style; I'm wrestling with an iMac, and I've never liked Apple computers so it's a learning curve trying to get this one to do what I want.)

A book to keep an eye out for this summer is a new nonfiction about Snow Man, the show jumper who was rescued off a slaughterhouse-bound truck. The Eighty-Dollar Champion by Elizabeth Letts is due out August 23 from Ballantine.

http://www.elizabethletts.com/eighty-dollar-champion/

And a completely unhorsey and unbookish tangent just because.

Well, I had to include a seasonal reference. So here are two bald eagles, residents of a wildlife rehab center/nature center in the Pine Barrens. There is something about their coloration that makes them just surreal to see in person, so to speak.

A somewhat gimlet-eyed Peregrine Falcon.

A cedar lake, shining brown in the sun. It's like swimming in tea, and just as effective at dying you, your bathing suit, your hair...

And the culprit, the cedar trees.

It's a bit more complicated than that, but I'm content with blaming the trees.

Horse Show Hurdles (1957)

2011-07-07T20:57:00.012-04:00

Horse Show Hurdles
Joan Houston, il. Paul Brown1957, Thomas Y. Crowell Company

A June wind, blowing down from the Vermont hills, parted Tam's dark bangs and flattened her shirt against her thin arms and chest. Her mouth was open a little, and her thick brows were pulled down in a frown of concentration as she pressed her heels against Bobolink's sides, urging the sorrel horse to a faster and showier trot.

13-year-old Tam Wade is finally back in the country at her uncle Pete's farm after the winter of New York City and school. Her favorite haunt is the Wilby Stable, but this year, it's under threat. A newer, flashier establishment is luring away customers. Tam is loyal, but Frank Wilby, the forthright old horseman who owns the barn, is his own worst enemy. Sure, LeRoy's stable is competition, but Frank's bad temper when faced with the sleazy LeRoy is the bigger problem.

"What do I care where you ride?" Frank's jaw was set dangerously. "It's no business of mine." He gave a kind of growl in his throat, rather like a dog when it is angry, and strode off to the barn.

Loyal despite Frank's tantrums, Tam spends the summer working hard to save the barn with the help of stableboy Steven and her fickle sister Cynthia. Also in the mix is LeRoy's new instructor, the glamorous French dressage master Captain Boudreau, and Frank's sister Miss Wilby. Tam's easy, youthful dismissal of the latter shows she's not quite the free-thinking young tomboy she pretends to be, but she gets a sharp surprise late in the day. The rivalry between the barns builds all summer, culminating in a near-tragedy at the local horse show.

The book's good points include generous illustrations by Paul Brown, a strong plot and some nuanced characters. On the minus side, the action drags in the middle, and the villain is flat. Although the author's treatment of the inevitable 'emotional growth' aspect of the heroine's story is subtler and most effective than most, it's also a bit clumsily done. One oddity is how the barns are presented - while LeRoy is clearly a sleaze, Frank Wilby is an angry crank whose instruction apparently isn't up to much. The emphasis is all on loyalty, with little interest in our heroine as to how best to advance her riding. When her sister Cynthia, under the sway of a snobby, image-obsessed pal, defects to the rival barn, Tam's incensed.

A good, brisk read which lacks something. Perhaps it's that Tam, for all she loves horses and her own adored Merlin, is usually more caught up in arguing with her sister or scheming against LeRoy than actually riding.

Livestock
Bobolink - sorrel gelding
Pinwheel - chestnut mare
Merlin - black gelding
Rambler
Firefly - filly
Riot - Irish Terrier (dog)

Another old book gets a re-issue!

2011-05-15T12:55:00.022-04:00

The 1965 book A Kingdom In A Horse by Maia Wojciechowska, which I reviewed here in 2009, is being reprinted in paperback by Skyhorse Publishing under their children's fiction imprint Sky Pony Press (February 1, 2012). In the book, a mare named Gypsy unites an odd couple; a teenage boy angry at his father for quitting the rodeo just as he became old enough to start competing, and an older woman whose childhood love of horses returns to sustain her after her husband dies. Skyhorse also featured previously on this blog in 2009 as the company responsible for reprinting Sam Savitt's first illustrated book, Gordon Wright's 1966 Learning To Ride, Hunt And Show.

In other coming attractions:

Fiction
The beautifully illustrated Horse Diaries series has another installment due in late October, Alison Hart's Risky Chance, about a Thoroughbred racehorse during the 1930s. (Random House, October 25)

The Winter Pony by Iain Lawrence (November 8, 2011, Random House) follows a wild white pony who becomes caught up in Scott's expedition to the South Pole.

The Breyer Horse Collection has another installment as well in Jessie Haas's Chico's Challenge (November 8).

Dandi Daley Mackall has a new series from Christian press Tyndale House Publishers in Backyard Horse. The first book is Horse Dreams, and the second is Cowboy Colt. Both appear to be scheduled for a September release. The idea behind the series is (from Tyndale's website):

The theme of the Backyard Horses series is that being beautiful on the outside is not the most important quality to develop. Our inward appearance is much more important to God (1 Samuel 16:7).

An interesting approach in the horsey genre, which has always had a weakness for great bloodlines and spectacular talent.

Jane Smiley has another Young Adult novel coming out in True Blue (September 27, Knopf). Her young heroine has a fairly common fictional experience of effortlessly inheriting The Horse Of Her Dreams, but begins to suspect that the horse's deceased owner is haunting her. Another interesting approach that appears to rethink the classic "Oh, some old adult person died and left me Whickers!" plot.

Nonfiction
The Eighty Dollar Champion: Snowman, The Horse That Inspired A Nation, by Elizabeth Letts is due out from Ballantine on August 23, 2011. Bought out of the infamous New Holland auction in 1956, actually taken from the slaughterhouse-bound truck, Snowman repaid new owner Harry de Leyer by becoming a quality show jumper. He also became a bit of a celebrity, his rags-to-riches story complimenting his appealing personality.

Big Black Horse (1953)

2011-04-16T22:59:00.017-04:00

Big Black Horse
Walter Farley, il. James Schucker
1953, Random House

Walter Farley's classic horse novel The Black Stallion made over into a simple intro-to-reading board book for younger children, with bright color illustrations and darker, more realistic black-and-whites. It was re-released by Random House in 2007.

I've always liked these illustrations, but the scale is sometimes a little odd. Funny how the Farley books had a variety of illustrators who all seem to have grasped the essential high style and fantasy element of the books, and reflected it in their work. Even the out-sized stallion here fits right in - the books frequently insist on The Black's enormity, his vast physical presence, and how he's far larger than a normal Arabian.

Links
The Black Stallion website
James A. Michener Art Mueum on Schucker
2010 interview with Farley's widow

About the illustrator
James Schucker (1903-1988) was, like Farley, a long-time resident of Pennsylvania. He did magazine illustrations and advertising as well as book illustrating. In the event anyone goes looking for his circus books, fair warning, his clown illustrations are hugely disturbing.

Other books
Little Black, A Pony
Little Black Goes To The Circus
Little Black Pony Races
The Horse Tamer (dj for original 1958 hardcover)
The Big Book Of The Real Circus
The Book Of Clowns
The Big Treasure Book Of Clowns
The Wonder Book Of Trucks

Golden Prize and Other Stories of Horses (1965)

2011-04-10T20:04:00.017-04:00

Golden Prize and Other Stories of Horses
1965, A Whitman Book, Western Publishing
Il. Cliff Schule

“He’s mine! I won him. He’s all mine.”
“Golden Prize” by Erva Loomis Merow

This collection of short horse stories for the younger reader is clearly intended for an audience with very basic reading skills. The plots are simple, the language plain and a little dull. All appear to have been written for this collection.

The cover illustration fits none of the stories. The interior illustrations have that strange, muted muddy tone that Whitman seems to have inflicted on all its books - here it's reddish; two other Whitman books I have (More Than Courage and The Wolf Of Thunder Mountain) have a slightly more clear green. All have different illustrators, so it's not the artists. All, of course, suffer the brittleness that I complained about in my review of More Than Courage, though I have managed to not actually destroy this book just by reading it.

List of stories
Golden Prize by Erva Loomis Merow
Molly Takes A Holiday by Mabel Watts
Runaway Rob by Peg Bottomley
Lefty, The Wrong-Way Pony by Florence Laughlin
Dancer Carries Double by Trella Lamson Dick
The Cow Pony by Bernadine Beatie
Coco, The Circus Horse by Jean Fiedler
A Present For Peanuts by Eva Grant
Clancy’s Last Tour by Jean Lewis
Little Con by Ellen Dolan
Partners by Jean Lewis
Golden Ghost Stallion by Sharon Wagner

Summaries

“Golden Prize” by Erva Loomis Merow
A small boy enters his name in a department store raffle and wins a horse. A pleasantly unlikely tale, complete with happy ending, despite the little snag that Terry and his parents live in an apartment.

Molly Takes A Holiday by Mabel Watts
The seashore would put sparkle in my eyes, thought Molly. It would bring back my appetite. She looked at Mr. Freddy with her big brown eyes. Then she laid her head against his arm.

A fishmonger takes his cart horse down the shore with him, and is richly rewarded when she saves him from drowning. An enchanted public promptly calls for a law decreeing all working horses receive a vacation each year. By far the most entertaining and well written story in the collection.

Runaway Rob by Peg Bottomley
The smallest pony in the circus gets fed up with coming dead last in the parade and runs away to find the respect and love he craves. Polly, meanwhile, sees a chance to get herself a pony and goes in search of the missing equine.

Lefty, The Wrong-Way Pony by Florence Laughlin
A dude ranch pony is afraid to turn to the right, making him very unpopular with the young campers. Then Peter comes along and tries to work Lefty past his fear.

Dancer Carries Double by Trella Lamson Dick
Nancy talks her big brother into taking her along on a ride on Dancer, to climb into the mountains in search of an eagle’s nest. When Gary is hurt, Nancy must ride the big horse down to find help.

The Cow Pony by Bernadine Beatie
A judge of horses would have known he was a quarter horse, prized by cattlemen all over the West. But this was dairy country. Few of the men or boys at the auction knew or cared very much about horses.

When Jodie sees a tired, defeated-looking horse at an auction, he bids on him out of pity. Then, a bull gets loose and Rebel’s instincts and training take over. Well done, though the classic dig at the tameness and dullness of farm country versus The West is a little much.

Coco, The Circus Horse by Jean Fiedler
A rosinback becomes frustrated with never having the chance to show off his tricks, and runs away in search of an appreciative audience.

A Present For Peanuts by Eva Grant
Jimmy and his friends race to save their favorite lesson horse, Peanuts, from being ‘sent away,’ which they realize means he’s to be killed because he’s growing too old to handle regular work. Some anachronisms are that the sympathetic stableman is ready to send Peanuts to an early grave, and 15 is considered too old to work.

Clancy’s Last Tour by Jean Lewis
Skip loves visiting with New York City police horse Clancy every day in Times Square, and is sad that Clancy is set to retire to the force’s farm upstate in just a few days.

Little Con by Ellen Dolan
Danny’s uncle buys him a Connemara from gypsies who promptly cause a fire and cause Danny and Con to race off across the Irish countryside in search of help.

Partners by Jean Lewis
Another New York City setting, as a pair of siblings try to take over their ailing grandfather’s horse and buggy ride through Central Park.

Golden Ghost Stallion by Sharon Wagner
Two children at a Montana dude ranch go in search of a mysterious palomino stallion, driven by their conviction that he’s trying to communicate. Fanciful, but nicely done.

Authors
Many if not all of the authors were specialists in writing picture books for very young children; several of them have multiple titles for Elf (very small, square picture books which had glorious color-saturated illustrations and which are typically somewhat fragile, having a binding which tends to unravel) and appear to have made a nice living from picture-book versions of popular television series ranging from Lassie to Swiss Family Robinson.

Erva Loomis Merow (b. 1922)

A Wisconsin native who was a teacher and missionary. She also wrote Pony (1965, A Whitman Tell-A-Tale Book), a photo book for beginner readers about a foal playing with a ball.
University of Wisconsin Hall of Fame

Mabel Watts (1906-) Born in London, she eventually became an American citizen. She did many picture books, including Henrietta And The Hat (1962), a charming horse story I’ve been meaning to review here for ages. Other horse books include Read-Aloud Horse Stories, Casey The Clumsy Colt, Little Horseman (1961, Elf picture book), and Helpful Henrietta (1959, Elf picture book)

De Grummond Collection
Little Horseman on eBay

Florence Laughlin
I have to admit an element of malice for this author; one of my other book interests is children’s stories about witches (there are, for the record, quite a few of them, so this isn’t completely insane) and Laughlin wrote one I can’t stand, The Little Leftover Witch. Nearly all these books end with the erstwhile witch child happily becoming a normal kid, so I shouldn’t really hold it against Laughlin, but the illustrations are so attractive and the little witch so bad at first, the ultimate resolution is doubly depressing. Laughlin wrote a seemingly horse-themed book in The Horse From Topolo (1966), but it appears to refer to a Mexican artifact rather than a real animal.

Trella Lamson Dick (1889-1974)
Another teacher, she wrote a popular series about an adventurous boy, Tornado Jones, as well as the equine story Burro On The Beach (1967) (il. Ted Lewin), about siblings who discover donkeys employed on a Pacific Northwest beach to haul cars off the sand.
The Children’s Literature Research Collections at the University of Minnesota

Bernadine Beatie
Evidently a Mormon (based on her presence in a book of short children’s stories in an anthology which states its purpose is to promote Mormon values). The Mormons, as anyone who has ever taken an interest in researching their family tree already knows, have a thing for documentation and some of Beatie’s short stories live online through the main website for the Saints. Her horse-themed story, Josef And The Lippizanners (January 1983, Friend) is here. She also has a horse story, “Danny And The Palomino,” in a horse anthology published by the magazine Highlights For Children - Storm’s Fury: And Other Horse Stories (1992)

Jean Fiedler
She wrote in a variety of genres, including Young Adult novels, mysteries, and picture book versions of 1960’s TV shows like Lassie, Gentle Ben and Daktari.

Jean Lewis
Did picture books for The Flintstones, Tweety, Lassie, Benji, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Scooby Doo and other television shows and movies. Most horsey (and, to my mind, most amusingly), she did books for Rainbow Brite, the 1980’s Hallmark cartoon featuring exceptionally sparkly, candy-colored girls and their pet horses WHO CAN FLY. Please see video below for exceptional levels of giggling and repressed feelings of wanting a sparkly white horse with a rainbow mane.

Sharon Wagner (1936-)
Born in Idaho, raised in Montana and a college student in Colorado. Most well-known by horse fans for her Gypsy series (Gypsy From Nowhere, Gypsy And Nimblefoot, Gypsy And The Moonstone Stallion), Wagner also wrote another horse book, Prairie Lady (aka Prairie Wind), and the somewhat horsey Dude Ranch Mystery, but most of her more than 40 books were Gothic romances. Which makes sense, seeing as how horse stories are essentially Gothic romances minus a man.

Illustrator - Cliff Schule
Also illustrated Saddle Patrol by Carl Henry Rathjen(1970) – odd note, Rathjen was one of several writers who produced a volume in the Trixie Belden series. He also wrote two horse stories which appeared in The Boys’ Life Book Of Horse Stories (1963), “The Curb Bit” and “Sacrifice Spurs.” He also had a horse story in The American Girl Book of Sports Stories (1965), “Trophy For Sheri.”

Other editions
Whitman Books went into paperback as Golden Press in the 1970s, and Golden Prize was no exception. The paperback featured on this sale site reeks of the latter era.

And a Rainbow Brite video!!!

Totally nothing to do with horses, books, ponies or even chronicles

2011-04-04T21:22:00.018-04:00

Daylilies, looking like the thugs they are

It was over 80 degrees today, and didn't get dark out till 7:30pm. A day to drive home from work with the windows open and Springsteen playing. And then start hauling out the gardening books.

Suppose a wicked uncle who wished to check your gardening zeal left you pots of money on condition you grew only one species of plant: what would you choose?
My Garden In Spring by E.A. Bowles (1914)

Lily

He chose the iris. While I admire the fleur de lis, particularly the little yellow ones that grow wild around here, I'd choose dahlias or zinnias (possibly peonies). I'm not the tastefully understated sort of gardener; I like flowers that meet you halfway and knock you over. At the moment, though, I mostly confine my gardening fervor to wildflowers spotted and photographed on walks. This allows the dog to get some exercise, and me to avoid that finance-shattering temptation, the nursery.

Spatterdock

Milkweed

But I may buy some pansies. They have sweet faces, are fragrant, thrive in shade and have the good grace to die by mid-summer, just when you have completely gotten over the whole gardening mania for another year. And I've managed to beat back the English Ivy just enough to clear a small border where they'd look wonderful.

There is one link between horses, books and gardens - they're bankrupters, all of them. I find gardens the worst because I can, just about, manage to resist the temptation to purchase livestock, and books can be bought cheaply unless you're fussy about editions and conditions, which I am not, as a rule. But good, healthy plants never come cheap. And like horses, they have an uncanny ability to sicken, to get into accidents, and to languish in a semi-useless state of non-productivity for no apparent reason.

And next time, back to horse books with a review of a fairly new acquisition, another frail Whitman Book.

Wesley Dennis's ponies

2011-04-03T19:07:00.019-04:00

In Wild About Horses, a nonfiction book which examines the history of humans with horses, author Lawrence Scanlan devotes one chapter to ponies, and attempts to understand the phrase "pony character," as used by the breeders and owners he interviews. While he maintains he never quite got the whole idea, he came up with a good starting point:

I imagine that a pony with pony character has a strong sense of his own self.

Although Wesley Dennis did many pictures of horses, there's something infinitely appealing about his ponies. Their shaggy roundness offsets their ever-alert ears, making a portrait of scruffy, everyday realism that is so much more inviting than the elegant perfection of, say, Anderson's flawlessly long-striding Thoroughbreds or Savitt's athletic hunters. And maybe that is another part of pony character; reality. You never hear about a pony having "the look of eagles;" there are no legends of wild ponies leaping to their deaths to escape the mustangers. They're not fanciful or legendary. And Dennis's ponies look like realists.

Your Pony Book by Hermann Wiederhold

Dennis's collaborations with Marguerite Henry were the most famous, but he illustrated a slew of other pony books where that 'pony character' came through the illustrations.

The Ginger Horse by Maureen Daly

A Cavalcade of Horses, ed. Florence K. Peterson and Irene Smith

Old Bones by Mildred Mastin Pace

Your Pony Book by Hermann Wiederhold

Links
The Wesley Dennis website

A Day At The LBJ Ranch (1965)

2011-03-26T21:46:00.009-04:00

A Day At The LBJ Ranch
Sam Savitt, author and illustrator
1965, Random House

"If we do meet the President, what should I say?"

Jackie and Dennis have been chosen to represent the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts on a visit to President Lyndon Baines Johnson's ranch in Texas. The two are understandably nervous about meeting their famous host, but before that moment arrives, they are taken on a tour of the ranch, riding Quarter Horses and learning about the history of the area and the Johnson family, as well as getting an inside look at the backstage of life at the Texas White House.

When the little calf tried to get back to its mother, the gray spun around almost faster than their eyes could follow. The horse kept facing the calf, quickly flanking it away from the others.

The kids, both enthusiastic riders, are impressed with the Western horses, and Jackie tries her hand at cutting - with mixed results.

Ultimately, a pleasant book and nicely illustrated, but a bit odd. It functions largely as a 'this is our President' tutorial, in a reader-friendly fictional format, with plenty of Texas history and landscape thrown in. The characters are flat and the brief story is not very involving, but the situation is so unique and the art is so Savitt that I think I'll hang onto my copy. Savitt, normally a decent writer, seems unable to maintain that quality in this very short, simpler format, and the style is wooden as a result.

Links
Sam Savitt website
de Grummond Children's Literature Collection - Savitt
Johnson City (presidental hometown) Chamber of Commerce
Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park
Life Magazine photo of LBJ on his Tennessee Walking Horse mare, Lady B

Hopalong Cassidy And The Bar 20 Cowboy (1952)

2011-02-25T22:51:00.019-05:00

When I was cleaning out the attic, I came across a dead squirrel, cardboard boxes from mercantile establishments no longer in existence (R.I.P., Lit Brothers, Wanamakers and Strawbridge & Clothier) and several long-lost books. Including this Little Golden Book.

E.M. Beecher, il. Sahula-Dycke
1952, Simon and Schuster
Based on characters created by Clarence E. Mulford

Starting in the 1920s, Clarence E. Mulford wrote 28 Western novels starring a heroic cowboy (Louis L'Amour would write another four). Paramount brought the character to the screen in 1935, using silent film actor William Boyd. 65 films later, Hopalong Cassidy was an industry that spawned a radio show, television programs and personal appearances by Boyd and his horse Topper.

Now, I never saw the movies or TV series, but I loved these illustrations. Also, the idea of sneaking up on a horse and capturing it for my very own.

And then branding it neatly with my own initials.

Looking at these illustrations again reminds me how I used to love pintos. Now they call them paints and they're muscular Quarter Horse types, but I grew up reading stories where pintos were always scrawny little Indian ponies, who lived wild and free on the wide prairies.

About the author.
I couldn't find anything about E.M. Beecher, but my real interest was in the artist, anyway. Ignantz Sahula-Dycke (1900-1982) was born in Austria, emigrated to the U.S. and eventually specialized in art of the Southwest.

Links
Hopalong Cassidy website
Wikipedia - Hopalong Cassidy
B-Westerns about Topper
Fusco Four Modern - Sahula-Dycke
Toklak website - Sahula-Dycke
Mulford's books at Fantastic Fiction
Wikipedia on Lit Bros.
- on Wanamaker's
- on Strawbridge & Clothier

Cactus Kevin (1965)

2011-02-20T17:10:00.022-05:00

Cactus Kevin
B. Holland Heck, il. Lorence Bjorklund
1965, The World Publishing Company

"A fellow on a farm has to have a horse."

It's 1944, and Kevin Bryson's parents have just moved the family from Tulsa to a farm (his dad, working at the Douglas Aircraft Company, a war industry, is presumably exempt from the draft). He's never been on a horse, and he has trouble remembering his new chores, but he loves being out in the country and once he sees a neighbor's palomino gelding, he's in love. The neighbor, a brat named Freddie, is notorious for mishandling his horse, which further inflames Kevin. But apart from the Bryson's lack of money, there's a problem in that the former city boy is fighting his parents' doubt that he is responsible enough to have a horse. From leaving the calf without water to teaching the rooster to fight, Kevin seems to constantly give his father a reason to be exasperated.

The family has problems apart from his wanting a pony they can't afford. Kevin's mother is struggling to maintain a primitive, rural house, while his father is discouraged by the sizable task of bringing a neglected farm back to life. Their worst problem is their well is dry, something the previous owner failed to mention. As the family slowly moves forward, digging a new well, buying calves, and learning the ins and outs of tractor control, Kevin is often too busy dealing with the new demands of farm life to long for a horse.

It rained again that night, making the ground muddier than ever. The Brysons scarcely knew how to cope with the mud. Dad said, "That's the blackest, stickiest, contrariest stuff I ever saw." Kevin thought both Dad and Mom seemed a little defeated by it. A variety of thin, straggly grass grew in the yard, but it didn't keep them out of the mud as their lawn grass in town had done. This grass pulled up by the roots with the mud, helping to hold the mud together that much tighter.

Kevin eventually gets his chance, Freddie gets his comeuppance, and the family triumphs over their early adversity. A very solid story about a family, but not particularly horsey as most of the book is about the family's struggles with the farm. I'm a sucker for tales about Black Angus calves, tractors and digging wells, but I was a bit disappointed, especially as the few really horsey scenes are flat. There is one hair-raising accident scene, which you can see coming the first time Freddie uses his horse to race the school bus.

Like most farm books, it does an excellent job of showing the dangerous side of farming; Kevin, who rides out the above rear without turning a hair, is terrified when his father's first ride on the new tractor nearly turns to tragedy.

Heck also does a nice job of presenting realistic characters. The mother isn't saintly or silly; the little sister is bratty but strong (and Kevin swings between "Awww, sis" reactions and doing things like building her the snow horse above), and the father can get discouraged and unreasonable. Perhaps reflecting the isolation of their ranch, there are few characters outside the family, apart from old Wrangler Slim, an old man living nearby who befriends them when Kevin, early on, wanders into a cactus patch, and who gives him his nickname.

About the Author
Bessie Holland Heck based this book on her own family's adventures, and Kevin was based on her son Ronald. She was married with five children, a freelance writer who lived in Tulsa and, during World War II, on an acreage just like the Bryson family's.

Other books
Millie (1961) (il. Mary Stevens)
The Hopeful Years (1964) (il. Lorence Bjorklund)
The Year At Boggy (1966) (il. Paul Frame) - adventures of farm workers' children
Captain Pete (1967) (il. Robert Cassell)
Golden Arrow (1981) - also horsey (il. Charles Robinson) (Scribner)
Cave-In At Mason's Mine (il., Charles Robinson) (Encore Editions)
Danger On The Homestead (1991) (Levite Of Apache Publishing)
Taming The Homestead (sequel to above)

The books after 1981 appear to have been published by a very small regional publisher, and little information is available on them. All the books appear to be juvenile fiction.

Links
de Grummond Collection
Ponymad Booklovers blog on Heck
Jane Badger Books about Heck
Catoosa, OK

Horse books that aren't

2011-02-15T20:23:00.010-05:00

Looks promising, doesn't it? A girl, a horse, waves. And to be accurate, there are horses in the plot.

13-year-old Alyssa lost her parents to a hurricane when she was ten, and has been mute ever since. She can't even tell her beloved grandfather that she would really rather he not sell their small riding stable on the Gulf Coast and send her to live with her disapproving aunt Melinda. Despite the presence of several factors I can't stand - including a harpy aunt with a saintly husband, a heroine presented as an eternal and pretty victim, and a male relative with a bit o' dialect from t'old country - it's a well-written book. Just not a horse book.

The most famous horse-book-that-isn't has to be The Red Pony, Steinbeck's bloody Valentine for the pony set.

In writing this blog, I've been flexible in my definition of 'pony book,' largely because the genre as traditionally defined is a small, starved portion of American children's books. We just do not have many books about adolescent girls riding in gymkhanas. So I've been easy-going, as if you haven't noticed. My guideline has been, if it whinnies or brays, it can go in. And I'm a sucker for illustration, so I've included picture books, and then I'm still recovering from a childhood of Walter Farley and C.W. Anderson so a disproportionate amount of racing posts have snuck in. So where does the line go for 'horse book' and 'not-a-horse-book'?

I'd say it goes between books which treat the horse as a symbol (of girlish childhood, of freedom, etc.) and those that treat them as actual horses. I suppose the former isn't terribly unreasonable. Though it remains a mystery to me, there are a lot of people who grew up around horses and essentially thought of them as if they were bikes; fun, somewhat useful, a nice thing to have, if you're a good person you take good care of it, but nothing to get all excited about.

Though, when you cut it like that, was National Velvet a horse book? Was My Friend Flicka? Both focused on their dreamy heroes and to a large extent the horses, although they took a satisfying chunk of center stage, were symbols of dreams and growth. Can a book that attempts to be more than genre writing be a horse book, or are horse books, a mini-genre themselves, too simplistic?

What do you think?

Mister Ed, The Talking Horse (1962)

2011-02-15T19:46:00.013-05:00

Mister Ed, The Talking Horse
Barbara Shook Hazen, il. Mel Crawford
1962, Golden Press

Ed, having taken possession of the phone once again, invites an entire orphanage to visit for the weekend.

I really have no excuse for this, except that I have always loved the illustrations in this Little Golden Book.

In talking horse-related topics, the cheerful memoir Alan Young (aka Wiiiiiilbuuuur!) published in 1995, Mister Ed And Me, is worth a read.

About the author
1930-
Hazen was born in Ohio, worked in publishing and then began freelancing as a children's writer after her son was born. She has written over fifty books.

About the illustrator
1925-
Canadian-born Crawford seems to be one of the most popular illustrators for Little Golden Books. As the post on the blog Illustration Station shows, Crawford did another equine-themed Little Golden Book in 1958's Fury Takes The Jump.

Links
Barbara Shook Hazen's website
de Grummond Collection on Hazen
Illustration Station
Mel Crawford's blog
Mel Crawford on a website about collecting Little Golden Books
Alan Young's website

Puddleby (2010)

2011-02-13T19:09:00.015-05:00

The writer/publisher of this book very kindly sent me a copy to review.

Puddleby
Thea Wilcox, il. Lorraine Ortner-Blake
2010, Puddleby Pony, LLC

"We are a family, even though we are different types of animals. No one is going to separate us!"

The little chestnut pony Puddleby is happy living with his friends Smooch (a pot-bellied pig) and Cedric (an old white goose), and the three conspire to remain together whenever potential buyers come to look at Puddleby. This changes when Miss Thea arrives. She can literally understand their speech, and quickly discerns that the three want to stay together. They go to live on Windham Hill Farm, where Puddleby makes equine friends for the first time. But living with show ponies makes the tiny Puddleby worry about his own talents. Too small to be ridden by any but the smallest of children, a poor jumper, with plain movement, he's clearly not meant for show ring success. What he doesn't realize is that Miss Thea has had a plan for him all along - she wants to use him as a therapy pony.

This is a sweet book with charming illustrations and an attractive, fairy-tale quality. The first half, which focuses on the animals, flows better than the second half, which introduces elements requiring more explanation. At this point, the story and the language become somewhat more labored as the author struggles to introduce new characters and convey the nature of the training Puddleby undergoes.

The book seems to have originated with a real-life therapy pony, and was written to raise money for a charity, Going Miles For Smiles, which appears to focus on the use of therapy ponies.

Note
I was somewhat confused by the Miles For Smiles purpose. I'm aware of hippotherapy, in which horseback riding is used as a physical and mental therapy for the disabled, and I've heard of dogs, rabbits, cats, etc., being taken into nursing homes and hospitals and the like as 'therapy animals' to comfort and engage people who are sick, elderly, etc. But using a small pony for the latter purpose seems overly complicated, considering the practicalities of taking even small equines inside a building. The website says:

Going Miles for Smiles aims to seek out and discover people of all ages who are losing hope in life, for those who are sad and despondent, or for those who simply have had some bad luck in life and need a lift upwards. GMFS is committed to ensuring that attention is given, entertainment is provided, and above all love is poured forth for those whose dreams are dashed or who have a sad view of the world and their life at hand.

Googling around, I found an article which says that Wilcox traces her inspiration back to a prayer where she decided to do something special to 'give back' if a very sick child she knew recovered. The child recovered, and she later recalled the promise after buying Puddleby.

Animals
Puddleby - small chestnut pony
Smooch - beige pot-bellied pig
Cedric - white goose
Adam - grey show pony
Jupiter - chestnut show pony
DieZel - black show horse

Links
Puddleby The Pony website
Going Miles For Smiles
Puddleby on Facebook
Lorraine Ortner-Blake's website
Another review, at the blog Horse Book Reviews

Related Links
American Hippotherapy Association

And video link - the real Puddleby playing with an even smaller equine:

So pretty!

Sandro's Battle (1962)

2011-02-05T23:28:00.015-05:00

Sandro's Battle
David Scott Daniell, il. Colin Spencer (cover by Charles Geer)
1962, Duell, Sloan And Pearce

Anna was a donkey with a happy disposition. She knew she was beautiful, because Sandro often told her so. Her coat was creamy white with a dark cross along her spine and shoulders. Her little hoofs were gold-colored and her ears were long and furry.

Anna and her adoring young owner Sandro (aka Allesandro Michelangelo Tavistock Brozzi) live in the half-ruined Castello della Fontana in central Italy during World War II. Anna hates thunder, and to her delicate ears the constant, threatening rumble of the advancing war is just another terrifying storm. To Sandro, who is Italian but had an English grandmother, the war is a problem. His composer father is dreamy and impractical, leaving Sandro to take care of the mundane things of life. Which is how he ends up hiding in a confessional during a skirmish between British and German patrols. When the Brits push the Germans out, they stumble across the pair:

"What's up, Miller - found some Jerries?"
"No, sir, but look over there!"
"Great goodness, what ever is it?"
"A tail, sir. Looks like a donkey's."
"I believe you're right, Miller."
"Just the tail, sir, hanging through the curtains."

Sandro graciously invites the friendly Brits to tea the next day, an invitation he soon regrets when he returns home and finds that the Germans have moved in.

The Germans are quickly annoyed by the Brozzi family. Anna's stable is taken over by a machine gun that frightens her badly and prompts Sandro to ask the German officer in charge to please let him move her away from it.

Upset her! A donkey with bad nerves! Really, I cannot understand you or your father. He thinks of nothing but music, and you think of nothing but your donkey! Do neither of you realize we are at war?"

If he hadn't, he soon will; his new friends the English are planning to destroy his home, now a German fortress, through aerial bombardment. Horrified, Sandro begins to scheme to save the castle. And Anna, the little white donkey terrified of explosions, will ultimately save the day.

About the Author
1906-1965
Albert Scott Daniell was born in London and used various names during his creative life. As David Scott Daniell, he wrote many radio plays before turning to novels. He married Elizabeth Mary Thirlby in 1939, and served in Italy during World War II. The blog Bear Alley contains a very long list of his many published works.

Links
The blog Bear Alley, about David Scott Daniell
The website Easy On The Eye, which specializes in Ladybird Books, on Daniell's non-fiction Flight series about travel.

Snow, snow, snow, snow

2011-01-30T22:41:00.019-05:00

The Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale (NESIS) developed by Paul Kocin and Louis Uccellini of the National Weather Service characterizes and ranks high-impact Northeast snowstorms. These storms have large areas of 10 inch snowfall accumulations and greater. NESIS has five categories: Extreme, Crippling, Major, Significant, and Notable.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

I like that "Crippling" is only the second-worst category.

With well over a foot of snow on the ground and an ice storm on the way, I'm feeling a little jaded. Hence, some wintry lines from horse books. It's hard to judge whose feelings toward the winter are more bitter, the humans -

Oh, how I hated the winters. I loathed trailing about in the mud and the snow, blue-nosed and quaking with aching, numbing cold, labouring with bales of hay and buckets of feed for wild-eyed, ungrateful brutes who galloped up, spraying me with dirt, shoving and pushing me about, squealing and kicking at each other, and giving me crafty nips when I was not looking in case, for one misguided moment, I had imaged they actually liked me.
Not Quite A Horsewoman by Caroline Akrill

The thermometer outside the window read eighteen degrees above zero, but as she trudged down to the barn it felt more like eighteen below. It was starting to snow again. The gray sky had deepened and a thin film of blowing white was beginning to fog over the dark woods that bordered the pasture.
Vicki And The Black Horse by Sam Savitt

- or the horses.

Out into the cold and away from their cozy place in the woods the pony herd traveled. The little colts stayed close to their mothers and whimpered when frost pinched their noses.
Broomtail by Miriam E. Mason

The drifts were up to his chest, and it took all the strength of his powerful muscles to plunge his way through them. Often he had to rear and leap into them, one jump at a time, to break through at all.
Blitz: The Story of A Horse by Hetty Burlingame Beatty

Note:

While the book pictured has absolutely nothing to do with horses, the Haders did create one horse book, Little Appaloosa, and illustrated various horses for Louise Seaman's book Mr. Peck's Pets.

More contest ponies in real life - and a literal Pony Book

2011-01-26T00:13:00.023-05:00

Advertisement from a January 1916 issue of Farm Journal, taken from Google Books.

A magazine called The Farmer's Wife used Shetland Ponies as the grand prize to encourage children to sell subscriptions, back in the day of industrious childhoods, long before Girl Scouts sent their parents out to sell their cookies for them. In part, the ad above reads:

We Have Given Away 342 Ponies If You Want One Write Quickly

We have a big Pony book full of pictures and stories of Shetland Ponies written by happy boys and girls to whom we gave them. Send your name and address for free copy. You never read such a wonderful book. 342 boys and girls already made happy with one of these darling Shetland Ponies, each with buggy, harness, saddle, bridle and blanket, all free, sent prepaid. Outfit is easily worth $200. Who is the next boy or girl to have one? Speak quickly children or have your parents write; we want to give away 100 more but they won't last long. Every child has an equal chance no matter where you live. Write us a postcard or letter today.

Don't you just ache to send that postcard? Or at least send away for the book? Happily, there is still a contest to be entered. The blog Farmer's Wife Quilt is giving away copies of the author's latest book, The Farmer's Wife Pony Club Sampler Quilt. According to the blog:

The Farmer's Wife Pony Club Sampler Quilt will contain a letter and one or two photographs of each Lucky Pony Winner, and complete instructions for making a 90-block queen-size sampler quilt.

I'm not sure exactly how one makes a quilt, but the photos and letter sound irresistible. It seems to be one entry per person, and open to Americans and non-Americans alike.

About the publication
North Dakota journalist Edward A. Webb was already running a small media company when he bought a Minnesota newspaper in 1903 and handed it over to his sister, Ella. The family sold the paper in the 1939 to an agribusiness magazine familiar to me from its incongruous location on elegantly urban Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia - Farm Journal. This magazine folded the women's newspaper into a mere section of itself and eventually changed it to Farm Family Living. Farm Journal itself was an early practitioner of using databases and aggressive subscriber research to narrow their focus - and thus appeal to their advertisers.

Links
1938 Time article on The Farmer's Wife
Nostalgiaville images of The Farmer's Wife covers
Minnesota Historical Society - The Webb Company
Farmer's Wife Quilt (blog)
Answers.com on Farm Journal history

Other People's Blogs

2011-01-22T21:05:00.020-05:00

As previously mentioned, I like thrift shops. One thing that frustrates me, though, is that I am not very good at finding anything there except books. I'm a bookhound; I can find the one weird, old, or unique book in the usual sea of Grisham and Steel and textbooks and romance novels and the inevitable copy of The Cross and the Switchblade. But when I try to browse the clothing or the junk, I'm lost and I find nothing. My mom walks into a thrift shop filled with mugs and ash trays and emerges with a little wooden box with a secret compartment or a piece of good silver jewelry with a simple but beautiful design. My sister sails out with insane clothing bargains, including the boots I've been searching for all year. (Which I then stole. She's forgiven me; after all, she found new ones the next week.)

In the same way, I'm horrible at finding stuff online. I tend to visit the same three sites, blogs and forums over and over. But today I actually went out looking for blogs with horse book entries. The results are below - some are recent, some are older, some are more about art or nostalgia than straight reviews.

WestEnd Talk
Artist Anne Bialk writes about her interest in horse and art.

Reading Tween
A kid's-eye book review of The Pony Whisperer by Janet Rising

Whitebrook Farm's recent review of Misty Of Chincoteague was a rare foray back to an old book for the blog, and worth reading just for this crack:

Paul and Maureen have been thrown at the Beebes because their parents are gallivanting around in China (for what seems like five and a half years), only their parents have made a crucial error. The Beebes own horses. Not only do they own horses, they live on Chicoteague island, an island packed with ponies. An island packed with ponies that holds annual pony festivals where they basically give these ponies away to any kid who mows enough lawns during the summer.

There is no way those parents are getting their kids back.

The Broke And The Bookish reviews a Young Adult fantasy, Behind The Mist by M.J. Evans. I'm not a fan of horses in sci/fantasy (maybe I've just never read one I liked) but many people seem to, and it does seem properly horsey:

Another thing that stood out to me about this novel was that you can really tell that Evans loves horses, and I especially loved that. There are times when a person is so passionate about something and you can just feel it in their words or what they say. Evans' passion absolutely shines through the pages, much in the same way that the power of love shines through Nick and Jazz. If you love horses, you will love this book, without a doubt.

Eva's Book Addiction reviews Pegasus by Robin McKinley.

Any Good Books/Mixed Reviews looks at The Horse Boy (nonfiction) by Rupert Isaacson.

Christian Children's Book Reviews examines early reader book Andi's Pony Trouble by Susan K. Marlow, which sounds kind of sweet. Also reviewed at My Precious Peas

Home School Book Review isn't enthused about Pony Farm Mystery by Pamela Kavanagh (it's from the Pony Club series, so I can guess it's not very good.)

Dovegreyreader Scribbles on Fly By Night by K.M. Peyton.

Mutterings And Meanderings on book hoarding and the Jill books.

The Wrath of Lilith on pony books as a mildly embarassing (secret shame) thing. Much enjoyed for this line:

Ah, old English books about rosy cheeked children dashing about having adventures on horse back and going to pony club rallies, hunter trials and gymkhanas.

Also the Pat Robertson quote on the blog header. Oh, Pat.

At the blog Komalius, the author reflects on her childhood love of horses, horse books, and being given the book How To Draw Horses by Walter T. Foster, which immediately struck a chord with me as horses are the only thing I really can draw, having had years of practice as a hopelessly wistful wannabe horse owner.

At The Boswellians, another reflection on childhood horse love, complete with photos, including one that made me sit up and think "That's my Merrylegs!" And if I end up spending the night digging out my box of Breyer models just to find my very own version of Anna Sewell's charming children's pony, I know who to blame.

On the Collector's Quest blog, one woman recalls her discovery, at a used book sale, that the Black Stallion books she grew up with originally had different covers:

I paid my 50 cents (my, this was a while ago now!), and I think I whinnied with excitement.

And, finally, ReRider Who's Learning To Cope looks at the male mentor character in horse books, from stern-and-right Michael in Summer Pony to Max in the Saddle Club books.

Horse books, fact and fiction, Part 1: You can win a horse!

2011-01-09T05:45:00.019-05:00

Illustration by Jeanne Mellin, from The Complete Morgan Horse Book

Just in case you thought the scenario of book characters winning a horse was a total fantasy...

The American Morgan Horse Association/Team Morgan's Win a Morgan Horse Contest It takes an application, an essay, a DVD, two letters of reference and a $50 entry fee, but this contest open to kids under 21 and running until January 19 (next Wednesday) is the real deal. A lucky child is set to win a 2-year-old chestnut filly.

It goes against the zeitgeist in my neck of the American woods, but raffling off large farm animals is still done in more rural zones. At the Midwest Horse Fair this past year, you could win a Haflinger, a draft horse, Tennessee Gaited Walker Pony, and a Quarter Horse at various raffles. (from an Examiner article). And apparently, it's quite common (and a more controlled, sensible setting) for 4-H clubs to award equines to club members in contests.

And in related, dreaming-of-a-farm news, you can also win a cow (a Belted Galloway, no less) from Grit magazine. Their rules require that you possess at least two acres of fenced land, with access to a shelter and water. I have with difficulty restrained myself from entering. I was less successful when their website helpfully informed me that sister pub Mother Earth News is running a contest with a chicken coop as the main prize.

Books
Oddly, I can't really recall too many books where Our Plucky Heroine actually flat-out won a horse or pony by pure chance. Usually there's at least a veneer of 'worthy' effort on their part. I imagine writers typically felt it was too 'easy' or implausible, as if just accidentally tripping in front of Squire Jones's hunter so he has to make your acquaintance, or just happening to see Old Man Schaeffer's favorite mare foaling downstream of where the floods are threatening to burst a dam - well this stuff could happen to anyone if she was just Plucky enough. In any event, these are what I could scrounge up.

Books where tots win ponies/horses/etc.
Dream Pony in the Sandy Lane Stable series by Susannah Leigh (1998)
Becky's Horse by Winifred Madison (1978)
The Pony Problem by Barbara Holland (1977)
Harry's Pony (an I Can Read book) by Barbara Ann Porte (1973)
National Velvet by Enid Bagnold (1935)
Heartland Skies by Melody Carlson (romance; city girl wins horse, falls for cowboy)(1998)

The Pony Problem, which has a particularly pretty cover, was a favorite of mine. The kid heroine (in full 1970s feminista) wins a pony in a contest then wars with her small-minded suburbanite neighbors to keep him.

Becky's Horse is a story of a girl who realizes she must sacrifice her dream so that her family can afford to ship endangered relatives out of WWII Europe. The cunning setup - girl matures through losing something - strikes me as appalling misogyny. Common as it is as a theme in children's literature, it's always on the girls. I've yet to come across a book where little Timmy learns that sacrifice is beautiful.

National Velvet, of course, features Velvet Brown winning The Pie in a raffle.

And of course, in terms of winning a cow, there was Trumper, whose hero used his horse to win a black Angus calf.

Late Addition to Blog
Also in the category of winning a horse but without the moral issues, the blog 3Ps In A Pod is running a contest for horse-crazy little girls to win a Breyer model horse. With brushable manes and tails. Horse Barbies!

Blueberry (1963)

2010-12-31T08:41:00.042-05:00

As a kid I read anything with an equine theme, but I truly loved the few books where the plot remained strongly focused on the kid and the horse. Winning the race, driving the cattle across Texas, capturing the wild stallion, rescuing the trapped foal from quicksand - yes, the big drama plots are nice. But the smaller plots were satisfying. They were the essence of the horse bug for me, those books where girl and horse would just ride around, in the woods and along the river and down to the creek for a swim on a hot summer afternoon.

And then the skein of days went unwinding. There was in them a unique completeness, a fulfillment. When she turned to Blueberry in the blind instinctive way of one in first-love, yet unhurt, the mare was always there. Wherever possible, Kristin moved with the horse at her side. Sometimes in the hot nights, noisy with the sounds of katydids and crickets, or a wakeful bird, she brought her pillow and quilt out to the paddock. The mare became so used to her presence that she wouldn't rise from where she rested, but watched the girl as she made her bed and lay down nearby. Kristin would awake to find the horse had risen and was chewing on her hay or waiting in soft animal fashion for Kristin to direct their day.

Blueberry
Helga Sandburg
1963, The Dial Press

Kristin, a dreamy 14-year-old Michigan girl whose hard-headed father is starting to worry will never learn to study or even just focus, desires a horse.

The summer streamed out before Kristin in a huge empty space of time. Every girl in the eighth grade had been boy-crazy except for Kristin. She was famous for being horse-crazy. Danny had a beat-up sidesaddle which he'd let Kristin strap on a log when she was nine or ten. Sometimes she felt half her life was spent at fantasies; nothing was real. In winters when she dragged her toboggan out on the snow-deep dunes she still called it a golden mare, whispering a name to herself. It was all imagining. She felt fiercely that she ought to have the real thing.

Summer vacation has just started, but 14-year-old Kristin's joy is broken by her father's anger; he's upset that her last report card was bad, that she's consistently forgotten to care for her pet guinea pigs, and that her best friend Danny Wasilewski is a half-Gypsy boy. Kristin has no intention of obeying her father's demand that she have no more to do with Danny, and her regrets about her grades and her wandering responsibilities take a back seat to her longing for a horse. Her two sisters, older and more beautiful and more capable, are strong farm girls whose pride and joy is their goat herd, and all their plans involve agricultural school and farming. They also despair of absent-minded Kristin, but they agree to help her convince their dad to let her buy a little buckskin mare from a carnival.

The mare turned her head, the black mane drooped uncombed, the forelock straggled over her brown eyes; her slender almost-black legs contrasted with the sandy-colored coat. Field burrs had knotted in her tail. Like the others she needed grooming. They looked at each other and as the mare turned back to stand with head drooped, Kristin knew her desire.

Kristin, swearing to improve her grades and bolstered by support from her mother and sisters, convinces her father to buy the little mare named Blueberry. She earns the mare's hay by doing chores for her sisters, and glories in first ownership, riding to the beach and through the woods at all hours of the day and night, having secret picnics with Danny and teaching Blueberry to swim in the lake.

Danny's life is going the other way. His gypsy mother is dead, his Polish father is a grieving, struggling truck-farmer, and he's frequently confronted with people (like Kristin's father) who harbor prejudices against both gypsies and Poles. In the fall, Mr. Wasilewski is so short of money he's forced to send Danny away to live with a harsh uncle, and the boy runs away. Kristin spends a long winter battling grades and time to cram chores, riding, and studying into the too-short hours, lonely for her missing friend.

Kristin's family is one domineering male against a mild wife and three daughters who tend to assume they can overcome his objections. Here and there, throughout the book, are short passages from the father's point of view as he regards, baffled, his womenfolk. Typical of its time, it fiercely presents support for equality and fairness for various people even while maintaining the norm of a girl focusing on a boy's needs and pain. Kristin, repeatedly dubbed a tomboy, is a strong girl, but she is given the womanly instinct of focusing excessively on male trouble.

She knew Uncle Jock figured all boys were in need of subjugation, forgetting Danny'd had a taste of authority while he took over a man's role, caring for his father and the farm.

While this is altogether a fine book with a strong, interesting heroine, several involving plots and a variety of well-developed characters, it's the powerful presentation of the bond between human and horse that makes it stand out.

Animals
Bimbo - collie
Smoky - crow
Teddy - Abyssinian guinea pig
Sophie - Nubian goat
Mr. Shams - blue Persian cat
Hurricane - bay gelding
Blueberry - buckskin mare
Red Wolf - chestnut Quarter Horse stallion

About the Author
1918-
Helga Sandburg wrote two books about Kristin and her horse, Blueberry (1963) and Gingerbread (1967) . They were set in Michigan, where Helga grew up on a property near Lake Michigan. The youngest of three sisters, Helga had two extremely famous near relatives. Her father was the poet Carl Sandburg and her uncle was the photographer and painter Ed Steichen. She was close to her mother, and the two of them began raising dairy goats at their Michigan home in the 1930s. She attended the University of Chicago, married three times and wrote several books.

Links
Cleveland Woman - Helga Sandburg
Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library - The Dial Press
The Dial Press - Random House
Dial Books For Young Readers - Penguin

Other Books (equine)
Gingerbread (1967) - sequel

The Dial Press
Founded in 1923, it changed hands several times. With third owner B.C. Hoffman, it began publishing more popular novels, including the inestimable Frank Yerby's 1945 novel The Foxes Of Harrow. It was bought out by Dell Publishing Company during the 1960s; Dell was bought by Doubleday in 1976. The children's division was sold to Dutton, which eventually ended up with Penguin (owned by media giant Pearson) while the adult imprint survives as part of Random House.

New Year, New Books

2010-12-29T21:33:00.000-05:00

And a short list of upcoming horsey fiction for the new year.

The A Circuit
by Catherine Hapka and Georgina Bloomberg (May 24, 2011) (Bloomsbury) (YA)

Belladona by Mary Finn (June 14, 2011) Candlewick

The Black Stallion And The Lost City by Steven Farley (June 28, 2011)

New in Paperback
Saddled by Susan Richards (1/6/2011) Houghton Mifflin (memoir)

Horse Diaries: Yatimah by Ruth Sanderson (January 2011) (Random House) (child series)
Raven Speak by Diane Lee Wilson (April 26, 2011)

Series
I Can Read Books - Pony Scouts by Catherine Hapka and Anne Kennedy
At The Show (May 3, 2011)
Back In The Saddle (March 8 , 2011)

Breyer Horse Portrait Collection by Annie Wedekind
Mercury's Flight: The Story of a Lipizzaner Stallion (June 21, 2011)

Picture Books
Race The Wild Wind by Sandra Markle and Layne Johnson (July 19, 2011) Walker Books for Young Readers

New printings
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, with foreword by Monty Roberts, afterword by Lucy Grealy (1/4/2011) Penguin Putnam

Odds N Ends - Romance with mini horse
Here To Stay by Catherine Anderson (1/25/2011)

Runaway Pony, Runaway Dog (1963)

2010-12-26T21:11:00.061-05:00

Tough Enough whined. The little dog was worried. He cocked his large ears forward; his eyes were restless, alert. He knew something was wrong with Sassy, his pony friend. The pony was limping toward a tempting clump of grass. Tough Enough was trotting along beside him. When the pony put his nose down to the grass, the dog whimpered softly and touched Sassy's nose with his.

A little dog and a chestnut Banker pony are best friends living in the Great Smoky Mountains on the Tuttle farm, adored by young owner Beanie Tuttle. But Sassy has a hurt leg, and when the two are sent off for a stay at the local vet hospital they don't understand why they've been exiled. Sassy manages to jump out of his field, and the two run away to search for their home.

Every now and then, Sassy would spread his nostrils and toss his head. Tough Enough's tail was up and waving. They were going home. They were sure of that.

They're caught by a mildly villainous character named Will Bumgarner, whose soft spot for animals has led him to maintain a roadside zoo. A generally kind man who helps Sassy's leg heal, he also maintains a collection of depressed wild animals in stout cages. Reluctant to part with his new pets, Will makes them a highlight of his zoo by dressing pony and dog in costumes for the customers, and resorts to defensively telling his wife it'd be a cruelty to send the nice little animals back to some hillbilly farm to work their lives out.

When they finally do escape, they revel in being free -

Both were finding happiness in roaming through sun-warmed, sweet-scented brush, in drinking from cold, rushing brooks, in hearing the steady whisper of water over rocks, in splashing and swimming in clear pools.

- unaware that their grieving owners are one step behind and heartbroken to discover they've just missed their pets. More adventures and dangers come between the animals and their family, but could there be a doubt that there's a homecoming?

I remember being somewhat leery of this book as a child. Beautiful illustrations, but the book's target audience is fairly young for the level of scariness. The length, very simple language and brief sentences indicates it's intended for intermediate independent readers but there are several disturbing scenes where the animals imprisoned or attacked, and they're starved nearly to death by the end of the book. There's also a fair amount of preachiness, from the idealistically poor-but-honest Tuttles to the anti-zoo emphasis and the general depiction of tourists as ignorant, backward and violent.

On the positive side are the lushly beautiful illustrations (though I still think Ruth's black and white drawings are even more beautiful, see the links below to the Hounds In Print blog about Scuffles for a lovely set of dog pictures.) Also, the writing is strong within the limitations imposed by the age of the audience, and major characters tend to be given more depth than is usual in a book for young children.

Background
This is the final book in a 7-book series about the Tatum family and their many pets. The detailed pastel pencil illustrations were the faithful result of years hiking in the area for the Carrolls, who were originally from New York but who moved to Asheville, North Carolina in 1950 and used their talents to counter stereotypes of Appalachia natives as ignorant, backward, and violent.

Setting
The Great Smoky Mountains cover parts of Tennessee and North Carolina, and contain both the Southern Appalachian mountains and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Idle googling and polio
The book is dedicated "For the Children in the Asheville Orthopedic Hospital." I googled it mainly to be thorough, as it appeared to be a worthy but not particularly exciting interest of the authors. But it is, actually, a bit interesting. The hospital was originally for children with developmental disabilities, but changed with the polio outbreak into a regional center for treating polio patients, mostly children. I watched a documentary on polio a few months ago, and it was fascinating. They made the point that the fear of polio was somewhat irrational, considering the relatively low number of patients and the relatively low rate of patients who died or were crippled by the disease, and that the crusade against it was something of a political scheme. And yet it remains a major sense of triumph in the collective imagination - the defeat of a scourge that killed and crippled children, a moral quest, the proof that human science could defeat implacable disease, evidence that we could apply gumption and dimes and send a killer virus packing. And does it matter, the complicating facts that there was more to the story? Or does it just go to prove that humans are natural storytellers, with an instinct to pick and choose our stories based largely on what feels narratively right, even in the absence of campfires and in the presence of Wikileaks and 24/7 news?

And, to make that little segue a little more horse-worthy, a list of horse books with polio themes. There's Vian Smith's 1966 novel King Sam (which I know by the American title, Tall And Proud), whose young heroine, Gail, refuses to work at recovering from a bout of polio until a retired racehorse gives her a reason to try to walk again. There's also a Josephine Pullein-Thompson book, Show Jumping Secret (1955), which has a male protagonist with a disabled leg from polio. In Stranger Than Fiction (1984), Joyce Stranger did a fictionalized bio of a polo player who suffered a childhood bout of polio. From Australia, there's Alan Marshall's autobiographical I Can Jump Puddles (1955), which chronicles the author's experiences as a kid who got polio. The sections concerning his efforts to ride again despite having only one strong leg pop up in horse anthologies sometimes. And, of course, there's Marguerite Henry's Mustang, Wild Spirit Of The West (1966) in which the heroine recovers from a childhood polio attack.

About the authors/illustrators
Ruth Robinson Carroll (1899-1999) was the illustrator, but she was also a co-author with husband Archer Latrobe Carroll (1894-1996). The two were originally from New York, but became fascinated with the Southern Appalachia region and moved to Asheville, North Carolina in 1950.

Archer was a 1918 Harvard graduate who had an undergrad short story "The Butterfly In The Fog" published in The Best College Short Stories 1917-1918. He served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, then worked as an editor and staff writer for various companies until beginning a freelance career. Ruth was a Vassar graduate who went to art school and did the illustrations for all their collaborations. They married in 1928. Their first collaboration was The Luck Of The Roll And Go.

Other Books in series
Beanie (1953)
Tough Enough (1954)
Tough Enough's Trip (1956)
Tough Enough's Pony (1957)
Tough Enough And Sassy (1958)
Tough Enough's Indians (1960)

Other Books - animals
Pet Tales (1949)
Peanut (1952)
Salt And Pepper (1952)
Digby The Only Dog (1955)
Scuffles (1963)
Danny And The Poi Pup (1965)
The Picnic Bear (1966)
The Managing Hen And The Floppy Hound (1972)
Hullabaloo, The Elephant Dog (1975)
The Christmas Kitten

Other Books
The Luck Of The Roll And Go (1935)
Flight Of The Silver Bird (1939)
The Flying House (1946)
School In The Sky (1949)

Links
The Tatum Family Series essay by Judy Teaford
Revisiting The Tatum family essay by Judy Teaford
The de Grummond Collection
The University of Oregon guide to the Carroll papers there
Ponymad Booklovers on the Carrolls and the Tatum series
"The Butterfly In The Fog" at Google Books
AskArt on Ruth Carroll
Asheville, North Carolina website
The Mounatin XPress about the Orthopedic Hospital
The National Park Service - The Great Smoky Mountains
Wikipedia on the Appalachias

Links to other blog reviews of the Carroll books
Peanut at Vintage Kids' Books
Peanut at Hounds In Print
Scuffles at Hounds In Print

And just to note, Hounds In Print is my neglected blog on dog books.

The Black Stallion's Filly (1952)

2010-12-22T23:41:00.011-05:00

The Black Stallion's Filly
Walter Farley, il. Milton Menasco
1952, Random House

Black Minx came into the ring held firmly by the white-coated attendants who handled all the horses up for sale. She was coal black and small. She had a quick, competent walk as she was led about the ring, and it was apparent to those who watched her that her limited size was misleading, for she had more muscle than was noticeable at first glance. Her head was light and beautiful with great breadth between sharp eyes, a slightly dished nose, a narrow muzzle and sensitive nostrils. Her only disfigurement was a short tail, so short that it was barely more than a stump.

Henry Daily, bored with life on Hopeful Farm after he retires Satan from the track, decides to buy himself a racehorse. He buys a two-year-old filly by the Black despite her dubious history (she took her last jockey through the rail, breaking his collarbone), sure he can fix her. Alec, content to stay home at the farm, isn't so sure, but in his quiet, reliable way decides not to argue but do everything he can to help his old friend achieve his goal - to have this wild, wilfull, contrary filly whose last race ended in the infield, ready to run in America's premiere classic, the Kentucky Derby. And win.

...[Alec] went back in memory to the days when Henry had taken him and the Black under his wing, when Henry had encouraged him to race the Black because he had confidence in Alec's ability to handle the stallion on the racetrack. At the time, Henry's enthusiasm had sounded just as fantastic... But it had turned out the way Henry had said it would. He had ridden the Black to victory over the best horses in the country.

First, Henry and Alec have to fix the filly's horrible ground manners, which include biting and kicking. In a sequence which is ground indelibley into the minds of anyone who reads the book, Henry finally resorts to a baked potato to cure Black Minx's willingness to bite. I won't spoil it by quoting, but that chapter alone makes the book worth reading.

While Henry is the trainer, Alec is the jockey and he quickly realizes that the filly's other issues are nothing compared to her indifference to racing. She has speed, but when Alec tries to work her faster, the filly placidly continues at the same pace as before, ignoring his urging to speed up. Henry's face, always grim, matches the winter weather of their New York state farm as he ponders how to best Black Minx and make her a racehorse.

In the meantime, Henry and Alec watch the televised races of warm-weather racing from Florida and California, where other Derby hopefuls are being honed. California darling Golden Vanity shows blistering speed in winning the Santa Anita Derby, Eastern colt Silver Jet lives up to his status as an early Derby favorite by winning the Flamingo Stakes, a filly named Lady Lee in the Louisiana Derby, and Wintertime and Eclipse in the Experimental.

An interesting book in that gruff, rough Henry has something personal on the line this time, and even loyal Alec sometimes wonders if he's seeing clearly. Farley's racing books tended to give the reader an extensive look at the competition, which creates a sense of realism, showing Henry and Alec studying the races of the horses and jockeys they'll be going up against in the Derby.

Horses
Black Minx - black filly
Golden Vanity - 17h chestnut colt
Moonstruck - bay colt
Silver Jet - grey colt
Lady Lee - filly
Wintertime - blood bay colt
Eclipse - brown colt

Ruth Sanderson paperback from the 1970s.

The most recent paperback edition.

The Horse That Had Everything (1965)

2010-12-11T00:05:00.048-05:00

The Horse That Had Everything
Newlin B. Wildes, il. Albert Micale
1966, Rand McNally & Company, American Education Publications

"Animals, animals," Kink said morosely. "The halt and the lame. They always seem to be with us."

Widower Kink Jonathan, an artist with a growing reputation, has chosen to live in rural Vermont with his 14-year-old son Rick, and they've gradually accumulated an assortment of animals. But Rick loves horses, and is a regular fixture at their neighbor's racing farm, where he forms an attachment to the crooked foal of the mare Never Fear. When the farm's cold-blooded owner, Slade Corcoran, decides to kill the crippled foal, Rick successfully begs him for another chance.

Rick raises the colt, who he eventually dubs Sans Peur, and with loving care and exercise the crooked leg straightens. And as the colt grows bigger and stronger and faster, the pressure mounts for Rick to turn his backyard pet into a racehorse.

This books holds an entertaining if typical premise, but is spoiled by a lack of pace. Wildes's writing is good enough piece by piece, with convincing action and a nice writing style -

Suzi took the saddle and bridle off Ulysses. He and the colt exchanged sniffs and got along, plucking grass side by side. They knew each other.

April is not the best month in Vermont. It often snows, the trees are still gaunt skeletons, the mud is not always gone. Nevertheless, there is promise of better things. Some days are, as the farmers' wives say, like a good apple pie: "warm in the middle and crisp around the edges." Cows are rough-coated in barnyards. Horses are shaggy, wandering in the fields searching for early blades of grass.

- but it doesn't have a natural flow. Scenes either inch along or jump sharply. Individual scenes are quite strong, but only for very brief moments and then the action lurches again. The major weakness, however, is the underlining of the major plot points instead of letting the reader infer them from the writing, which actually does a very good job if the author had only trusted it.

There are also two tedious minor plots in the growing awareness of the maturing Rick that neighbor Suzi isn't just an inferior girl anymore but a Girl, and the sometimes grating comparison between the big Thoroughbred San and Suzi's short, shaggy Morgan.

Note:
I read the book during this year's epic snowstorm, and seized on this bit -

Whenever there was a thaw and the snow became heavy and apt to cake on the colt's feet, Rick would rub butter all over the inside of San's hoofs to keep the snow from balling up there and twisting an ankle. "Darn expensive way to keep a horse's feet snow-free," Kink grumbled, when Rick disappeared with another quarter pound.

- to try with my dog, who also suffers snow buildup on walks. It works, but there are drawbacks. One, the dog clearly thinks you're mentally unstable for rubbing a stick of butter on her paws. Two, you end up taking a walk with hands coated in butter, which is great for dry winter skin but not so great for the general health of your mittens or your own sense of neatness. Three, it wears off fast, particularly if your dog discovers that her feet now taste great.

Equines and others
Ulysses S. Grant - Morgan gelding
Never Fear - grey Thoroughbred mare
Mon Oncle - Thoroughbred stallion
Sans Peur - grey Thoroughbred colt
Times Three - bay Thoroughbred colt
Abraham - donkey
Thomas Jefferson "TJ" Tibbs - large tiger cat
Albert - Plymouth Rock rooster

Author
The New England-based Wildes worked for Photoplay and then joined Curtis Publishing at their Boston office in 1937. The 1942 Gene Autry western Heart Of The Rio Grande was based on one of his stories.

Other Books
The Best Summer (1965)

Short Stories - horse
"Young Man On The Way Up" in Wildfire, The Red Stallion and Other Great Horse Stories

Short Stories - various
The Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1944 - "Gold In Your Backyard"
Companion, July 1945 - "Little Guy"
Companion, June 1946 - "Crazy Like A Fox"
Liberty, September 1947
Colliers, September 5, 1936 - "Foot In The Door"
Ladies Home Journal, April, 1946 - "A Matter Of Style"
"Powderpuf" - football

Illustrator - Albert Micale
(1913-1993)
An artist who specialized in comics, particularly Westerns, Micale's versions of Roy Rogers adventures are some of the most sought after by collectors. He also illustrated children's nonfiction, and some fiction.

Other horse-related books
The Best Summer by Newlin B. Wildes (1964)
The Capture Of West Wind by Rutherford B. Montgomery (1962)
Trouble At Paintrock: A Penny Of Paintrock Mystery by Jane and Paul Annixter

And because we mentioned Roy...
Trigger, the palomino stallion who was Roy's equine pardner, was (along with the singing cowboy's German Shepherd Dog, Bullet) stuffed after death. The two were auctioned off this summer, along with Dale Evan's horse Buttermilk and Trigger backup Little Trigger. Trigger and Bullet ended up with RFD-TV. The Nebraska-based cable network is named after the old U.S. Postal Service designation for rural addresses - Rural Free Delivery - and specializes in rural programming, from cattle auctions to bluegrass to Hee Haw. The two are now on tour to various appropriately themed events. RFD-TV has also revived a kids' fan club from the old Roy Rogers television show, the Roy Rogers Riders Club, which is unbearably bittersweet.

The Publisher
American Education Publication was a new one to me, so I googled. Apparently, it was the publisher of the school newspapers My Weekly Reader and Current Events, as well as other educational work, and owned by Wesleyan University Press until Xerox bought it in 1965. They changed its name to Xerox Education Publications in 1972.

Links
Kiddie Matinees (for the AEP info)
Weekly Reader
A list of Wilds's short stories
Comic Creator about Albert Micale
Luxist about the auction of Trigger and Bullet
RFD's Happy Trails Tour
RFD-TV

Scarlet Royal (1952)

2010-12-04T21:57:00.042-05:00

This is one of those books I had as a kid and remember with great fondness. The review below has almost no quotes largely because my copy is now extremely fragile. Just re-reading it pulled loose some pages; propping it open with a candlestick or flower pot so I can copy some quotes will kill it altogether. So I'll limit myself to the summary on the back cover, which does a good job.

The only thing in Margo's life that really counted was the horses themselves: riding them, hunting, showing, caring for them, loving them. Especially her own horse, Scarlet Royal - hers until the wealthy Cranshaws offered more than the struggling Macintyre's could afford to refuse. Be nice to the Cranshaws, her mother said. How could she like Ginevra Cranshaw who went off with her beloved horse and her best boy friend?
A story of sportsmanship and courage by the author of Senior Year.

Scarlet Royal
Anne Emery, il. Charles Waterhouse (cover)
1952, Macrae Smith Company

Margo Macintyre is 15 when her mare, Red Queen, produces a chestnut filly dubbed Scarlet Royal. The foal is to be the final triumph for Margo's father, William, an Irish immigrant whose rags-to-riches story has culminated in a gentleman's farm, Green Meadow, filled with horses, an adoring wife, three daughters, a cook, a housekeeper and a groom.

Jump ahead two years. William Macintyre is newly dead, killed by the stress of seeing his real-estate venture fail, and his widow presents their daughters with reality: they have a farm and horses, but virtually no income. They can either sell out and go live more frugally in an apartment, or they can try to launch a riding school. Relieved to save their beloved home, they agree to tackle domestic and stable chores none of them have ever handled. It's not easy, but they are making it work by the end of that first summer. Margo and her sisters help teach the beginners and their mother, Madeleine, has a private student who's more advanced. It's this student, Ginevra Cranshaw, who brings Margo's world crashing back down. A competitive, calculating daughter of rich and indifferent parents, Ginevra has only one interest in a horse - can it win for her. In Scarlet, she sees a horse who can take her to the Maclay Finals, and win her parents' attention at last. When Mr. Cranshaw offers Margo a price the family can't afford to refuse, a beaten Margo sells the mare.

When, adding insult to injury, Ginevra also walks off with Margo's boyfriend, the now 17-year-old Margo declares she's never going to trust another man. Shortly thereafter, the Macintyres hire a college student to work on the farm, and Neil begins to patiently prod Margo away from her bitterness and obsession with somehow winning back her lost horse.

This is a well-written book with a thin but consistent horse plot, and a strongly sympathetic heroine. It has a powerful hook in that the heroine actually loses the horse, and is also one of those great horsey books where the villain is the villain because she doesn't care about horses; she's a good rider, but she doesn't have the right attitude. Margo's love for Scarlet is criticized, but she remains focused on rescuing the mare, although she admits she's being selfish in some ways. It's a balanced book, which is typical of Emery. Her books were all teen romances, but they were intelligent and her characters were surprisingly complex. They were also far more feminist than you'd expect from the genre. Here, she kills off the blarneying father in under 10 pages, and he's virtually never mentioned again. The all-female family manages to resurrect its fortunes almost alone, with no male advice until the romance angle begins with the hiring of Neil Campbell, college kid from Wyoming, who quickly becomes annoyingly perfect - he charms the Macintyres, cleans stalls, knows horse shows, sorrowfully points out Margo's faults re: obsessing over Scarlet, etc., etc. He does a pretty good job of redeeming himself, though.

Note: The cover shown is from the 1961 paperback by Scholastic Book Services's TAB Books. The original 1951 Macrae Smith hardcover apparently contains interior illustrations by Manning deV. Lee; there is one illustration of his in the paperback, serving as a frontspiece.

The book, along with Emery's others, is back in print with Image Cascade, which publishes fondly recalled teen novels of the mid-20th century.

Odds and Ends

Equine Characters
Scarlet Royal - chestnut filly
Red Queen - chestnut mare
Counterpoint - grey hunter gelding
Gingham Girl - Welsh pony
Domino - black hunter gelding
Bittersweet - bay hunter gelding
Kingpin - Ginevra's jumper
Coquette - Ginevra's saddle horse

I don't remember noticing the name Ginevra as a kid (I was too busy booing her evil, crop-swishing ways) but this time around it caught my eye as a strange name. According to some fairly random research, it's either Welsh meaning "white, fair, smooth" and is a form of Guinevere, or Italian meaning "white wave." It was also the name of a Chicago socialite from the early 20th century thought to have inspired Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Since Emery was a Chicago girl all her life, and since writers are magpies and since people with roots tend to be people who inherit the memories of their parents and grandparents, you have to wonder if she had that story somewhere in mind when she named her spoiled, wealthy villain.

Links
Image Cascade - Scarlet Royal

Author Bio
1907-1987
Anne Eleanor McGuigan was the eldest of five children with a father who was a professor. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1928, spent a year traveling with her family, and then began teaching. She married John Emery in 1933, and had five children. She lived in Evanston, Illinois most of her life, and that Chicago suburb is where most of her books are set.

The illustrators
The paperback's cover and its sole illustration aren't particularly memorable, which is odd considering both artists were respected illustrators with decent careers. I'm not 100% sure of my research on the cover illustrator, Charles Waterhouse; there is an American artist of that name who seems to have specialized in military paintings; the name fits, and the timing is possible, but I'm not sure. There's no direct link - nothing about the Marine Corp. artist mentions this book - and the art itself doesn't seem very similar.

The frontspiece illustrator, Manning deV. Lee (1894-1980) was a graduate of Philadelphia's spectacular old art school, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He served in WWI, and then resumed his career as an illustrator for magazines and over 200 books.

Manning deV. Lee - other horse illustrations
The Stubborn Mare by Jo Sykes (1957)
Steel Dust, The Story of A Horse by Hoffman Birney (1928)
Horses, Horses, Horses edited by Phyllis R. Fenner (1951)
Cowboys, Cowboys, Cowboys, ed. Phyllis R. Fenner (
Sidi, Boy Of The Desert by Alida Malkus (1956)
The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang (1925 edition by Macrae Smith)
Dogs, Dogs, Dogs, ed. Phyllis R. Fenner

A pretty new version of Black Beauty

2010-12-01T22:08:00.011-05:00

Penguin is bringing out a new paperback edition of Anna Sewell's classic, Black Beauty.

Another way to get a pony...

2010-11-28T22:31:00.021-05:00

I thought horse stories had taught me all the ways you could end up with an equine - steal it, borrow it, capture it in the wild, unwrap it on Christmas morning or find it trotting serenely down the road looking lost and sad. But now, I discover a new way; get one as a real estate promotion back in the anything-goes 1950's! According to an article in the August 13, 1956 edition of Life magazine, entitled "A Galloping Popularity For The Pony," ponies were given away with houses in one Oklahoma suburb. Accompanying the photo below of the little girl riding hell-for-leather on a Shetland is the caption:

In her backyard in Midwest City, Oklahoma, Mary Good, 7, races her Shetland. Pony came free with house, one of 30 given away by builders with sale of $22,000 homes in development.

Also interesting is the information earlier in the article that Montgomery Ward listed ponies in its catalog. $179.95 cash for an untrained, purebred Shetland colt, or $18 down and 15 months to pay! Montgomery Ward apparently had two pages of animal listings, including ponies, dogs and donkeys for sale. The catalogs of Spiegel's and Sears Roebuck also sold donkeys and ponies in those wacky 1950s; Spiegel, at least, sold even more exotic creatures, like spider monkeys and zebras. Of course, in the wacky 1990s and beyond, you could/can buy puppies and horses and just about anything else online. The big difference these days is, you're burdened with the downer knowledge that most animals should not be bought online (with sources like Petfinder, websites of good breeders, etc., being the obvious exceptions) and that takes all the fun out of it.

Links
August 13, 1956 issue of Life
Dollar Times - inflation calculator
Montgomery Ward on Wikipedia

The Thanksgiving Treasure (1974)

2010-11-25T19:42:00.024-05:00

Thanksgiving, finest of holidays. A four-day weekend, loads of food, no gifting pressure, no massive buildup of holiday cheer, just a parade (switching between the slickness of New York and the hokiness of Philadelphia), a dog show (the Irish Setter won this year!), and food. Turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and olives and buns and more stuffing and gravy and pumpkin pie and whipped cream (the deliciously fake kind that comes in a little plastic tub), and I think I forgot to get some of the apple pie. Excuse me.

Back with pie. Despite the fact that this is a pretty big American holiday, it's never really been popular as a setting for fiction. That makes me all the more tickled to coordinate an appropriate book for today. To be honest, this is not all that horsey, but it does have a horsey theme. And it is a compelling book. Given its unusual pedigree, that's impressive all by itself. It was originally created as a novelization of a CBS made-for-TV-movie, along with three other books about Addie Mills, an adolescent girl in 1940's Nebraska. Everything about these books tells you they're from an earlier era, one where people didn't own a ton of stuff, didn't decorate to impress, didn't have junk food and toys bulging from every cabinet. The author vividly recreates a time when youngish adults were still deeply affected by the Depression years and the world wars, grumpy old codgers abounded, and everything was a lot more basic.

The Thanksgiving Treasure
Gail Rock, il. Charles C. Gehm
1974, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

I would have happily given up any member of my family or any friend, including Carla Mae, to have a horse, but the mere mention of the word was enough to guarantee an argument from my father. He had grown up on a farm, and he saw nothing thrilling about a horse. He simply did not respond to my fantasies of riding at a gallop across the plains beside Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

In November of 1947, Adelaide "Addie" Mills is growing up in Clear River, Nebraska, population 1,500, with her widower dad and her grandmother. Her dad's a curmudgeon, and has a long-standing feud with another local crank, farmer Walter Rehnquist. Rehnquist is a semi- hermit who threatens people with his shotgun if they trespass on his farm at the edge of town. Addie's always been content to accept her dad's view on the matter of the feud, but a combination of the season of overtures and the discovery that Rehnquist owns a horse gives her an idea; the Pilgrims and the Indians became friends over a shared meal on the original Thanksgiving, so why not invite the family enemy to the holiday dinner? Her dad's reaction is predictable.

"Well, think again before you come up with another damn fool idea like that!"

She tries to shop the idea to her best friend, Carla Mae, whose large family, she argues, won't even notice an additional face at the table. When that fails, she pulls out all the stops and argues that if no one wants the old grouch at their table, they should take a Thanksgiving meal
to him. Carla Mae is not enthusiastic -

"You're crazy!" she said. "The only reason you want to go is to see that stupid horse!"

- but gives in. Addie sneaks food off the table and then the two ride their bikes off into the darkness of a Thanksgiving afternoon. Rehnquist grudgingly lets them in and samples the food, but cuts to the heart of Addie's motivation -

"I'm a pretty smart old gink," he said, "So don't fool around with me, sister. Tell me the truth!" "I told you, it's the spirit of Thanksgiving, and ... I was worried about your horse."

It turns out the pinto mare is named Treasure, and Rehnquist is on the fence about letting Addie ride her until she mentions that her father won't let her ride.

A very short, quick book which moves along more by virtue of atmosphere and character than plot. It's not really a horse book - Treasure, while a pivotal part of the plot, is not actually in most of it.

This book - and the series it was a part of - has an odd story. The book was an early example of a book based on a visual medium, in this case a TV movie which originally aired on CBS on November 18, 1973. The movie was released on VHS as The Holiday Treasure, packaged with the far better-known prequel The House Without A Christmas Tree. Addie's adventures are based on those of the author/screenwriter, Gail Rock, and continue for two more movies/books, both of them also holiday themed. A Dream For Addie (the book) aka The Easter Promise shows Addie idolizing a famous actress who returns to her hometown of Clear River, and in Addie And The King Of Hearts, Addie develops a crush on a teacher.

Links
IMDB for The Thanksgiving Treasure (1973)
Flying Dreams - a fan page for the film trilogy
Collecting Children's Books blog - the books
Roy Rogers website
Valley, Nebraska

Other Editions
1) A Bantam Book/Scholastic edition from 1976 (with, unfortunately, some writing on the cover)

2) A Dell Yearling edition (1986)

3) It also appeared in Redbook Magazine as a serial in November of 1974.

And the TV movie
The actress who plays Addie actually broke her leg falling from the horse during filming.

About the Author
Roberta Gail Rock (1940-____)
Rock grew up in Valley, Nebraska, which seems like a basic name even for the Midwest, and moved to New York to work in journalism. She worked as a film/TV critic for Women's Wear Daily, and did freelance writing.

Kirkus Reviews, reining and racehorses

2010-11-21T03:27:00.044-05:00

Books
Around this time last year, a depressing bit of publishing news emerged. Tart-tongued book review bible Kirkus Reviews was closing after 76 years. The Nielsen Company, in full-scale retreat from the often awful world of magazine publishing, shut down Kirkus and Editor & Publisher. And then - reprieve. A shopping mall mogul bought Kirkus, which was named after founder Virginia Kirkus. New owner Herb Simon is also the owner of the NBA's Indiana Pacers, and part owner of a bookstore.

Editor & Publisher was also saved. The Duncan McIntosh Company resurrected the shuttered publication, sans its editor and star reporter, only to fire its remaining editorial staff late this year - the memo announcing the re-structuring is a little classic in bad writing:

"Editor & Publisher magazine will be utilizing more individuals for the print edition who are experts in their individual fields as opposed to reporters who track down experts and put the expert’s story into the writer’s words.

So, a few review from Kirkus of recent horsey releases: young adult fantasy novels Pegasus and House Of The Star, Jane Smiley's A Good Horse, a Ted Lewin picture book about a New York City barn, Stable and 2010 National Book Award winner (and racetrack fable) Lord Of Misrule

By Becky Hanson (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Reality
The largest reining show in the world kicks off this week in Oklahoma City. The National Reining Horse Association's NRHA Futurity and Adequan North American Affiliate Championship Show runs from November 25 through December 4, 2010.

Growing up with the elegant, long-legged, fiery Thoroughbreds of C.W. Anderson and Walter Farley as my ideals, I never had a notion of the West or Western riding. Then I grew up, began to realize that I could die, and started taking riding lessons. (In that order, which is, frankly, not the best order to do it - ideally you learn to ride before you learn that you can die, as that makes the whole process less fraught.) Once you give your fragile self to a large, skittish animal for safekeeping, those short, calm 'ranch-type' horses take on a whole new appeal. I went to a reining show a few years ago and what impressed me most was how, at the end of each round - a round that included galloping, spinning and bursts of speed - the horse stopped quietly at one end of the ring, the rider dismounted at his/her leisure, and they walked out in what can only be described as a mosey. I like a horse who can mosey.

And back to the Thoroughbreds... Mine That Bird, the gelding whose 2009 Kentucky Derby win charmed and surprised, has been retired. He'll have a retirement ceremony at Churchill Downs on November 28. The filly Zenyatta has retired (again) after coming a close, close second in the Breeder's Cup. And Philadelphia favorite Smarty Jones, who won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes in 2004, has been moved from Kentucky stud Three Chimneys Farm to Ghost Ridge Farms in Pennsylvania.

And in hyper-reality, Secretariat has made $55 million. It reportedly cost $35 million. I leave it up to those who understand box-office philosophy to decide if that's a winner.

Links
National Book Awards - Lord Of Misrule
Ted Lewin website
The Bloodhorse - Mine That Bird To Bid Farewell At Churchill
ESPN - Zenyatta Retires To Lane's End Farm
Ghost Ridge Farms
Box Office Mojo - Secretariat
NYT - Editor & Publisher and Kirkus To Close
NYT- Kirkus Gets A New Owner - From The NBA
Editor & Publisher

More tangents

2010-11-13T23:18:00.002-05:00

"All hunting stories are the same," said Clovis; "just as all Turf stories are the same, and all--"
"My hunting story isn't a bit like any you've ever heard," said the Baroness.
Esme

I've been fond of the short stories of H.H. Munro, aka Saki, since I discovered them in my college library. During the hours I should have been studying, partying, or (probably) reading books that actually were part of my English classes, I read him instead. There was something mesmerizing about those highly artificial stories, so many of them just little constructions around a wasp sting from his constant narrators, Clovis Sangrail and Reginald.

Saki's characters tended not to go near horses - knowing, apparently, that horses can reduce the most elegantly self-possesed human to sweating, ineffectual mania in under thirty seconds. In the story The Rogue, however, a horse plays a pivotal role in a newlywed's life. And in Esme, Saki makes a wholly unique contribution to the genre of fox-hunting fiction. Esme is also featured in a collection of horse stories, Classic Horses Stories: Fourteen Timeless Horse Tales, edited by Steven D. Price.

"It sounds a queer proceeding to ask for a horse back when you've just sold him," said Mrs. Mullet, "but something must be done, and done at once. The man is not used to horses, and I believe I told him it was as quiet as a lamb. After all, lambs go kicking and twisting about as if they were demented, don't they?"
The Rogue

Links
The Brogue - Beasts And Super Beasts
Esme - The Chronicles Of Clovis

New in November

2010-11-06T19:41:00.021-04:00

Pégase; Walter Crane via Wikimedia Commons

I was slinking along the Young Adult section of the library, trying not to look creepy and old, when I spotted a brand new fanatasy novel whose cover was not largely black, did not feature an expressionless virgin and whose title did not appear in a red ribbon floating across the heroine's cloud of violently floating hair. In short, a novel which did not appear to be about the Undead, the Fey, or the like. It was vaguely green, but grass green, not the poison green of a book about demons or wizards. My gaze lingered, and then my eyes widened as I took in the title.

I haven't read Pegasus yet, but I have high hopes. The pedigree is impeccable. McKinley's been doing fantasy for years; I particularly liked her two visits to the Beauty and the Beast tale, Beauty (1978) and Rose Daughter (1997). She's no Bella/Harry opportunist. Her vampire story, Sunshine (2003), was one of the better recent takes on the genre.

On the FAQ section of her website: I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever had for me was horses and horseback riding.

So she appears to be ideally suited to tackle the flying horse legend.

Also being released in November:
Most Wanted by Kate Thompson (Nov. 23, Greenwillow, Harper Collins) historical fiction
House Of The Star by Caitlin Brennan (Nov. 9, Starscape, Tor, Macmillan) fantasy

Links
Robin McKinley's website
Robin McKinley's blog
Penguin Putnam - Pegasus

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T19:45:00.006-04:00

As they entered the partially harvested, moonlit cornfield, Cricket snorted and swung her head from side to side. She eyed with alarm the stalks of dried corn that stood like skeletons of their former selves. The wind sent the dead leaves into a frenzy of rustling, like the clicking of miniature bones. Dustin pressed his heels into the mare's sides, but she refused to move faster than a nervous prance.
"Haunted Hayride" in the anthology A Horse For All Seasons by Sheila Kelly Welch (1994)

With a jack o'lantern glowing out front and a surprising number of children trick-or-treating to the house (including one girl dressed as an equestrian! true story!), I am driven to a holiday posting. However, I do not have a suitable review and, inexplicably, horse books with a Halloween theme are thin on the ground, outside series books. In the short story quoted above, however, I hit a perfect connection to my last post; in Welch's tale, a teenage hayride goes awry when the organizer's little brother swipes her barrel-racing mare and stages a little Headless Horseman action.

Halloween
Mr. McFadden's Halloween by Rumer Godden (1975)
Phantom Rider: Ghost Horse by Janni Lee Simner
Phantom Rider: The Haunted Trail by Janni Lee Simner(1996)
Phantom Rider: Ghost Vision by Janni Lee Simner(1996)
The Saddle Club: Horse Magic (#47) by Bonnie Bryant (1995)
The Saddle Club: Ghost Rider (#24) by Bonnie Bryant (1992)
The Great Pumpkin Ride by Laura Hesse (2004)
Riding Academy: Mary Beth's Haunted Ride by Alison Hart (1994)
Pony Tails: Corey And The Spooky Pony by Bonnie Bryant (1996)
Animal Ark: Pony In A Pumpkin Patch (#49) by Ben M. Baglio (2006)

Ghost Stories with Horse
Mystery Horse by Margaret Goff Clark (1972)
Gypsy And The Moonstone Stallion by Sharon Wagner (1980)
The Mystery Of The Crimson Ghost by Phyllis A. Whitney (1969)
Sydney's Ghost by Carol Iden (1969)
The Ghost Pony by Lynn Hall (1978) (aka The Mystery Of Pony Hollow)
Ghost Horse by George Edward Stanley (2000)

The Headless Horseman

2010-10-27T00:53:00.011-04:00

In college, I had a job as a witch at a Halloween hayride. We witches lurked in a dark corner of woods and when a wagon meandered past, we charged out and pretended to attack, screaming and cackling and clawing at the customers. Around 9pm, the kids and adolescents were replaced by teens and young adults, often drunk, who fought back with screaming insults and beer bottles. The tractor would carry them away before anyone got mauled, chugging off through the low, wet fields to do battle with the zombies next door. On busy nights, we'd be chasing one wagon as the next appeared behind us, and we'd have to roar back to the cauldron (which periodically caught on fire), on weekends the local cops would drive through, grinning, to round up an ornerier-than-usual customer. On slow nights, we'd walk down the road to visit with the neighbors - Freddy Krueger, Frankenstein's Monster, the zombies, the mad scientist and his victim. It paid minimum wage, but all in all, it was a highly satisfying job. The only downside was that I was on the opposite side of the property from the Headless Horseman, whose black horse I sometimes glimpsed as I drove into the parking lot.

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, by John Quidor (1801-1881)
Oil, 26 7/8 x 33 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Public domain via Wikimedia commons

The animal he bestrode was a broken down plow horse that had outlived almost everything but his viciousness He was gaunt and shagged with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs one eye had lost its pupil and was glaring and spectral but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil in it Still he must have had fire and mettle in his day if we may judge from his name which was Gunpowder.

Links
Google Books - The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

Circus Doctor (1951) - nonfiction

2010-10-14T23:10:00.014-04:00

I was standing at a bus stop in Philadelphia once, waiting dreamily for my ever-tardy public transit choice to heave into view through a spring rain, when an unusually designed truck stopped in front of me for a red light. And a small elephant looked out the half-open side door. I gazed in at the elephant, the elephant gazed out at the bus stop, the light changed, and we all went back to our lives. The circus, obviously, was in town.

I've never really liked circuses; the massive Ringling operation, the folksy modern-day tent shows, and the animal-less Cirque all leave me cold. That is, the shows leave me cold. The idea of being part of the circus, on the other hand, is fabulous. All that color and drama to take you away from drab and sordid reality. From Toby Tyler to The Greatest Show On Earth, I've always been a sucker for a circus story.

Plus, classic circus stories are like Westerns; even when they're bad, they have horses.

Circus Doctor

J.Y. Henderson, told to Richard Taplinger

1951, Little, Brown and Company

... the circus's biggest preoccupation was with its horses: Ringling Brothers had a fortune tied up in what was undoubtedly the most beautiful collection of horses in the world. They wanted everything possible done for the rest of their animals too, but experience had taught them that they couldn't expect that to be too much.

In September, 1941, John Ringling North called a young veterinarian and offered him a job. The vet, Henderson, was a partner in a mixed small/large animal practice in Louisiana, and suffering from the physical effects of anthrax. Fascinated by the idea of the circus and believing that the recent advances in veterinary medicine mean a chance to pioneer in the field of exotic animal care, he accepted.

In Ringling Brothers - Barnum & Bailey's winter quarters in Sarasota, Henderson is wary of his new, dangerous charges and takes comfort in the familiar:

On three sides of us there were open stalls, and on the fourth were box stalls where the most favored horses were kept. In the immediate center of the corral were patches of grass decorated with palm trees and a large watering trough... I examined the broad-beamed Percherons, smaller neat hackneys, smart American saddle horses, wild Arabians, the standard-bred horses, stockinged Clydesdales, and Andalusians.

Of course, Henderson treats the wild animals: the bears, which he discovers almost always need worming; the big cats, which seem to have a downright equine knack for strange accidents; a chocolate-loving hippo; and the elephants, who have a tendency to become footsore through walking on concrete so often. He and his wife even raise a particularly winning baby leopard, Sweetheart. His secret to treating animals seems to have been an exacting interest in details. He watches every horse act from the sidelines, noting each small incident like a horse bumping a leg on the ring, and treating the slight bruise before it can get bad. Fascinated by the wild animals, he spends time getting to know them and their trainers.

The busiest place in the world is not a beehive. It is not found by watching the ways of an ant, nor is it an army preparing for an invasion. The busiest place on earth is the grounds of a gigantic circus, two weeks before hitting the road for an eight-month season.

In that first year, with the value of vaccinations still in question, Henderson confidently tells the Norths that vaccinating the circus's 200+ horses will prevent the annual losses to shipping fever and sleeping sickness. That was a success. His attempt to halter two llamas for the parade was not.

While the pen boys stood there laughing, the two llamas chased me all over the pen. I was chastened and emerged unvictorious after being sprayed by both of them from head to foot.

Then there's the frankly alarming camel story, which I don't particularly care to relate in detail. Suffice it to say, camels appear to be extremely open-minded about personal matters most animals tend to regard with a great deal of jealousy. Henderson, perhaps because of this or because camels are just uncooperative patients, says:

I'd gladly walk a mile to keep from operating on a camel.

A year after he joins the circus, Henderson has an experience which irrevocably changes the way he views animals. On an August morning in Cleveland, a flash fire sweeps the menagerie tent, leaving animals dead, dying and badly hurt. Shocked by the aftermath, Henderson is impressed with both the stoicism of the badly hurt creatures and the willingness of those uninjured to go on with the show that night.

I knew then there is something in animal make-up akin to greatness in men. It is not just their size or their swiftness; their fierceness or their power. There is an inner nobility and a kinship to what is enduring in nature.

This is a essentially a collection of moments connected by quick throwaway lines about non-circus life. Henderson went into WWII in 1944 and served until 1946, rejoing the circus with his new wife, Martha, an aerialist. A few pages sum up their courtship, a paragraph goes to the war. A serviceable style, which supports but doesn't elevate the interesting stories, but which allows the author's humor and likeability to come through, and gives space to his passionate and sometimes elequent conclusions. Obviously dated, and some comments are a little depressing, as when he notes that the circus's horses are never put out into a pasture to graze.

And finally, it is a testament to the power of horses to do truly odd, arguably idiotic things that in a book filled with escaping lions, runaway giraffes and very angry gorillas, many of the most memorable mishaps have to do with the horses. A saddle horse, waiting on the ramp into Madison Square Garden, gets her hoof caught in her mouth. A liberty stallion decides to climb the bleachers, reaching the top row before deciding this was a bad idea. An absent-minded parade horse bumps into the tiger's cage and nearly gets scalped.

Links

Billboard magazine article about the Cleveland fire (8/15/1942)

C. Lee Martin et al blog - covers roughly the same period with Ringling

Buckles Blog - covers circus history, features a photo of McClain's elephants

Buckles Blog - photo of Henderson

Circus Historical Society

The Greatest Show On Earth (1952) - IMDB

Toby Tyler by James Otis

Other equine info

Henderson was apparently friendly with the Klebergs of the King Ranch, and their vet J.K. Northway, who recommended him to North. Ringling Bros., often bought King Ranch Quarter Horses for their show.

Name-dropping

John Ringling North - owner of the circus

Dr. J.K. Northway - vet of the King Ranch

Alfred Court - animal trainer

Damoo Dhotre - trainer

John Sabo - menagerie superintendent

Dick Clemens - cat trainer

Walter McClain - elephant trainer

Rudolph Mathies - tiger trainer

Justino Loyal - horse act

A Very Young Rider (1977)

2010-10-09T22:40:00.023-04:00

A Very Young Rider

Jill Krementz, author and photographer

1977, Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf

This oversized photo essay chronicling the experiences of young rider Vivi Malloy is a classic much beloved by women who were horse-obsessed girls in the 1970s and 1980s. Beautiful, evocative black-and-white photos illustrate the everyday chores, training and life of 10-year-old Vivi and her chestnut pony Ready Penny. We also meet Vivi's family, trainer and various friends, and travel to horse shows where Vivi and her older sister Debby are competing. The action is narrated by Vivi, whose voice alternates between matter-of-fact steadiness about chores and riding, and gleeful excitement about special events like a trip to a big horse show.

Vivi is shown participating in Pony Club and doing chores common to all who own horses, but the core of the book is her participation in the world of elite hunter/jumper horse shows. Debby is in training with George Morris, former Olympic rider and de facto god of the hunter/jumper world, and Vivi's trainer is his assistant. Vivi and her sister show at Devon, Lake Placid, Harrisburg, Washington D.C., and Madison Square Garden - the cream of the horse show crop.

Plenty of women remember this book fondly; it's a very beautiful book and that alone made it attractive to a whole range of kids, from those who had Vivi-like aspirations of going to the big show to those who just yearned for their own pony. I was one of the latter and I found the whole show aspect alien; not negative but unimportant. It was the day-to-day routine of her and the pony I found so appealing, as well as the obvious bond between Vivi and Penny.

If you were/are into showing, though, it was catnip. The horse show sequences are a who's who of that era's show world: Gordon Wright, Frank Chapot, George Morris, Michael Matz, Buddy Brown, Kathy Kusner, Bert de Nemethy, Rodney Jenkins.

It is dated now beyond the bell-bottoms and the harness-free velvet helmets:

I love cotton candy but it's so fattening. When I get older like Debby, I'll have to go on a diet. Debby's always on a diet or else George gets after her. Once she went on a pure liquid diet and almost fainted in school. I have to watch my weight now a little bit. You don't want to get too heavy for your pony. There's nothing uglier than a fat rider on a horse.

Granted, this is a book of its time and that time was blithely unaware of the dangers of encouraging teenage and adolescent girls to obsess over calories to the point of fainting. Still, that last little tidbit is telling. Morris is nearly as famous for his outspoken personality as for his riding and coaching, and he has long had a very strong opinion on weight. As times changed and possibly as he mellowed, he's toned it down, but the stories that circulate about his youthful comments are hair-raising. Worth seeking out, by comparison, is his monthly jumping critique at Practical Horseman magazine, as well as the happy parody of same at Hillbilly Farms.

About the author

Jill Krementz (1940-___)

A New Jersey native, she was married to Kurt Vonnegut.

Other Books

A Very Young Dancer

A Very Young Skater

A Very Young Circus Flyer

A Very Young Actress

A Very Young Gardener

A Very Young Gymnast

A Very Young Musician

A Very Young Skier

How It Feels To Be Adopted

How It Feels When A Parent Dies

How It Feels To Fight For Your Life

How It Feels When Parents Divorce

How It Feels To Live With A Physical Disability

A Visit To Washington D.C.

Holly's Farm Animals

Jamie Goes On An Airplane

Lily Goes To The Playground

Zachary Goes To The Zoo

Sweet Pea: A Black Girl Growing Up In The Rural South

Black Writers

The Jewish Writer

The Writers Image

Writers Unbound

Links - the author

New York Social Diary - a bit about Krementz appears halfway down the page

Wikipedia

Links - about the book

A May 1995 article about the book and its subjects at The Chronicle Of The Horse magazine. Extremely interesting, as it discovers what happened to everyone, ponies included; a pony nerd dream.

George Morris at Practical Horseman

Parody of GM's column at Hillbilly Farms

National Horse Show - originally at Madison Square Garden

The Devon Horse Show

Derby Hill, Buddy Brown's h/j training stable in California

Rodney Jenkins at The Showjumping Hall of Fame

Michael Matz at The Showjumping Hall of Fame

George Morris at The Showjumping Hall of Fame

Gordon Wright at The Showjumping Hall of Fame

Frank Chapot at The Showjumping Hall of Fame

Kathy Kusner at The Showjumping Hall of Fame

Bert de Nemethy at The Showjumping Hall of Fame

Sports Illustrated article about Dennis Murphy in the 1974 National Horse Show

Longview Farms, Dennis Murphy's h/j training barn in Alabama

The Problem Horse (nonfiction)

2010-09-27T22:57:00.017-04:00

I saw this little book on the shelf at a library, in amidst more typical old books like How To Ride Western (1970's era with copious dusty black and whites of Quarter Horses) and glossy newer books with titles like Buying Your First Horse. Despite the helpful practicality of the other titles, this sort of period piece draws my eye.

I know this blog is supposed to be fiction, and mostly American, but who could resist these illustrations?

It's smoother, but some of it reminds me of Paul Brown's work. It's that combination of action-striated lines with idealized, slightly vague backgrounds.

Links
Wikipedia on the author

Books by Summerhays
Here's Horse Sense

From Saddle to Fireside

Elements of Riding

Elements of Hunting

Riding For All

Observer's Book of Horses and Ponies

The Problem Horse

It's A Good Life With Horses

Summerhays' Encyclopedia for Horsemen

Our Horses Horses and Ponies

Riding on a Small Income

The Story of the International

The Young Rider's Guide to the Horse World

A Lifetime with Horse

About John Board
1895-1965
A polo player and illustrator.

Books by Board (author)

Horse And Pencil

A Year With Horses (1954)

From Point To Point

Polo

Horses And Horseman
Practical Horsemanship In Show And Field

Books by Board (illustrator only)
Horseback Riding by C.E.G. Hope

Work included in anthologies
The Horseman's Bedside Book (1964)
The Horseman's Year 1958

More examples of Board's art
Polo
Blacklock's Polo Art website

Fear

2010-09-19T21:45:00.027-04:00

"Fear and her walk on different sides of the street."
Phantom, Son of the Gray Ghost by C.W. Anderson

It takes one of two things to ride a horse - the boldness of assuming you'll be fine, or the courage of confronting your fears that you won't. Sally in Phantom is perhaps the typical heroine of a horse book - bold and energized by a challenge, wholly trusting in her horse, a sensitive and intuitive rider who can bring out the best in any horse no matter how dull or high-strung.

Others struggle with fear. Sometimes it's brought on by a bad accident and sometimes it's an initial caution about riding, but it is always intense because the heroine almost always loves horses and the fear means a lack of ability to be perfectly with them, and because the world of riding is still, despite its domination by women, desperately macho and there is a tremendous shame in being afraid, in losing one's nerve.

Over the past three years the gray horse had given me a pretty rough time - no doubt about that. I had hit the ground, bounced back and hit the ground again, and aside from bruised bones and charlie-horsed muscles, never gave it a second thought. But with each successive jolt a little more heart was knocked out and always a little less returned.
There Was A Horse by Sam Savitt

Judy pulled the tan jodphurs over her slim legs. She fumbled at the belt with hands that trembled. Biting her lip she tried to steady her jangled nerves. She knew this was utterly ridiculous but try as she might she could not put aside the panic that came over her. Judy who loved riding more than anything in the world was now approaching her daily riding class with a cold fear that clutched at her heart.
Afraid To Ride by C.W. Anderson

"How about taking Calico over the low hurdle just once?" But Sue shook her head. All she could think of was the pounding of the mare's hoofs on the woodland bridle path, the growing feeling that she was out of control, then the sudden terror, the panicky tugging at the reins as she went into the jump, the sensation of falling, falling...
Spurs For Suzanna by Betty Cavanna

Wendy wanted to scream at them, to tell them that it didn't matter if the horse was gentle or not. "I don't know," she said softly after a moment. "I don't want to be afraid, but I can't seem to help it."
Gypsy From Nowhere by Sharon Wagner

Luckily, there are always people to help our heroes out.

"They're not especially brave," he told Sue thoughtfully. "They love to jump. They get a lift out of it. It's great sport. Brave people are people who are scared, like you, and still manage to conquer the things they're scared of."
Spurs For Suzanna by Betty Cavanna

Mr. Jeffers paused a moment and then continued. "I don't know if you will ever feel like riding again, but don't cut yourself off from horses because of it. Think of the thousands who go to horse shows and races who have never ridden. Let yourself enjoy seeing them without being a rider. With you I've always felt it was part of your life."
Afraid To Ride by C.W. Anderson

When I was young and starting out, I was afraid. Then I got over it. Just as you will. When you want to do something very much, you just do it. I always loved horses and I wanted to ride more than anything else on earth. So I had to overcome my fear. And I did."
A Morgan For Melinda by Doris Gates

And then, there are the people who don't understand.

"Are you that shook up over your first ride?"
"Yes, I am. I could maybe go back and ride Sam again. But I don't feel up to another strange horse right now. You've just got to understand, Dad."
He nodded and made a left turn, heading home. "It's just hard for me to understand people who are afraid of horses, that's all. Especially my own kid."
A Morgan For Melinda by Doris Gates

There are other sorts of fear in pony books, of course.

"Oh, God, give me horses, give me horses! Let me be the best rider in England!"
National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

Like Velvet praying for horses, a few horsey heroines suffered the worst fear - that they would never to get a horse at all, or not until they were adults and far beyond hope.

She was nearly twelve and soon it might be too late... people should start riding at ten. If you did not learn to ride as a child, you would never acquire a good seat [the book] said... Fly-By-Night by K.M. Peyton

... I was twelve and terrified in case I should die before I had ridden in the Horse of the Year Show at Wembley...
Dream Of Fair Horses aka The Fields Of Praise by Patricia Leitch

Anyway, we'll have to do something before we get too old." Pip pushed her black bangs straight up into the air. "If we don't hurry, we'll be grown up. Then I suppose we won't even care about horses anymore. Grown people don't seem to."
Borrowed Treasure aka Shooting Star by Anne Colver

I'll let Mr. Jeffers, the quintessential Anderson mentor figure from Afraid To Ride, have the last word.

"I know," Judy said miserably. "I just can't bear to look at them. I've lost my nerve. I'm such a coward."
"Don't ever say that again," said Mr. Jeffers sternly. "I've watched people for more years than I care to remember and I never use that word. I've seen the timid, the bold and the foolhardy, and there's not that much difference between them when it comes to real courage."

The Crumb (1976)

2010-09-10T19:00:00.007-04:00

The Crumb

Jean Slaughter Doty

1976, Greenwillow Books (William Morrow and Company)

It took me all of two seconds to yank on my jeans and jacket and set out for the hills on The Crumb. It was a lot colder than it had been the day before. The wind was damp and clammy and blew the pony's tail in all directions, which he hated, and he actually managed to dump me off by bucking through an open gate. I was insulted, the pony was cross, and we were barely communicating by the time we got to the back woods again.

Cindy Blake is riding her pony, formally dubbed Buttercrumb Cake and informally known as Crumb, through the fields near her home when she encounters the spooky vision of a horse van lurching through an old cow pasture. Instinctively hiding, she watches as two men unload a horse into an old hay barn, lock the door and leave. Perplexed, she investigates but the barn is firmly locked, the horse inside just a sad whinny. Still curious, she returns the next day but the lock is gone, the horse is gone. All that remains is some hay, a water stain and a hypodermic needle. Frustrated, Cindy shrugs and moves on to other concerns. Primarily, how to keep one pony fed, shod and clad in appropriate winter blankets.

Shyly, Cindy ventures to a nearby barn, a new and high-flying show barn run by the pleasant Jan Ashford, and lands a job as a groom, show helper and all-around gopher. Her liking for Jan makes it doubly confusing when that sinister horse van arrives with the same men inside. One is pro rider and trainer Alex Russell and the other is his groom, Dan. Worried and curious, Cindy decides to say nothing of the weird events in the hay barn - Alex isn't a permanent fixture, after all, and his presence at Ashford is an indication of Jan's kindness. She'd offered him a temporary wing of the stables when his own had burned down.

Alex, an unfriendly sort, has a dubious reputation as a rider but one fantastic horse, the jumper Cat Burglar, has changed his life. Like many people, Cindy envies him the horse and the chance it's given him to hit the big show circuit. But Alex is not very welcoming to fans, and she contents herself on the friendly side of the barn, with the kids and their ponies.

The early show season was about to begin and there was a lot to do. Every saddle and bridle had to be checked over and a single frayed stitch or the least trace of wear was enough to mark for repair or replacement. Shipping bandages were washed and dried and rerolled for each pony. Blankets, fly sheets and waterproof rain sheets and woolen coolers were shaken out, cleaned if neccessary, and refolded into each pony's own tack trunk.

Cindy's other problem is discovering there's an ugly side to horse shows. When she learns about trainers drugging ponies, cheating and using their connections to keep them showing, she's shaken. Big money, as her brother says, means big trouble, and she's swimming in far from comfortable waters as she moves from local fun shows and backyard ponies to professional shows and expensive ponies. Jan's a good person and Ashford Farms is a decent place, and Cindy believes she can take the good without having to deal with the bad. But reality can't be shut out. At a big show during a brutal heat wave, the truth comes out in the most painful way possible.

Two moments in particular are haunting and honest. In the first, Cindy thinks ragingly of the terrible unfairness of things:

I'd loved my pony, I'd taken good care of him and treated him kindly and called for the vet whenever anything went wrong, while the Alexes of the world went on their lucky way over the broken-down horses they ruined without a second thought.

The second moment is the final line, which needs to be read with the rest of the book, in time, and is a heartbreaker.

This is a very concentrated book. I didn't realize it until recently, but nearly all the action takes place at the one horse show. Most of Cindy's time at Ashford is compressed into a quick overview, and then, bang, we're at the horse show where everything happens. There are a number of very well-done flashbacks, so it's not as obvious as you'd think. It's not a flaw, just curious. The book moves along at a good clip, while still being tremendously realistic and satisfying.

Horses

Buttercrumb Cake, aka The Crumb - 14.1h dun pony gelding

Bright Interval - chestnut mare

Cat Burglar - brown gelding

Sam - gray Welsh pony

Whispering Sands - red bay Connemara/Arabian mare

Skipper - black and white pinto pony

About the Author

1929-

Jean Slaughter married cartoonist Roy Doty, with whom she worked on the local 1950's TV series The Danne Dee Show. She bred Welsh Ponies and Keeshond dogs at Rockrimmon Farm in Conneticut. She is elusive online. I did come across an online real estate listing for a property formerly known as Rockrimmon Farm in Simsbury, CT, but I don't really know if it's the same one, though the name is clearly a match and she did tend to set her books in the state.

Other Books - fiction
Summer Pony
Winter Pony

Can I Get There By Candlelight?

Monday Horses

Dark Horse

Yesterday's Horses

If Wishes Were Horses

Valley Of The Ponies

Gabriel (dog)

Other Books - nonfiction

Pony Care

Horses 'Round The World

Horsemanship For Beginners

Links

University of Southern Mississippi - de Grummond Children's Collection

Another review of The Crumb, at The Horse & Habit blog

Other Notes

Just wanted to mention - the Wyeth illustrations were all from Wikipedia Commons, not my own images. In the course of editing, I managed to delete that particular note when I wrote that post.

Sorry about the complete lack of illustrations for The Crumb. I will add it when I sort out my computer issues.

Illustrators - N.C. Wyeth

2010-09-08T21:01:00.009-04:00

Once upon a time, there was a family of artists in Pennsylvania's most beautiful valley. Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), the first to arrive in the Brandywine Valley, came to study with Howard Pyle, and the similarities are evident at a glance; lush, richly colored paintings that are just fantastic enough to be thrilling and just realistic enough to be stirring. N.C. was just the start, though. Two daughters and one son became artists, one daughter a composer. Andrew, his most famous son, had a son who also became an artist.

I have mixed emotions about the Wyeths; it is possible to get a little sick of local heroes. When you're from Philadelphia, there's a certain level of exhaustion surrounding Quakers, Ben Franklin and cheesesteaks. Never soft pretzels. But you see my point. There's something insufferably smug about the Wyeth franchise in the lovely, rolling countryside south of the city. The adorable and disturbingly pristine former grist mill that houses a collection of their work, and which exists as the Wyeth museum to all visitors, though it's formally called the Brandywine River Museum. The endless books about them in local libraries and bookstores. You can get this temptation to mutter "You know, the really big artist was Andrew and he actually seemed to prefer his place in Maine."

But the point here is that N.C., the original artsy Wyeth, did fantastic horse pictures. An illustrator, he created iconic images for several children's classics, including The Yearling and Kidnapped. Despite the fantasy elements he used here for the Arthurian legend, he was also quite the Western artist, and his cowboy paintings are also worth looking up. One thing I find very charming is the tendency his horses have of having vividly expressive faces. Look at the rolling eyes of the black knight's horse below, or the alarmed face on the brown horse of the cover - here are horses who are not quite happy with the shenanigans their riders have gotten up to.

Links
The Brandywine River Museum
The Brandywine River Museum's N.C. Wyeth Catalogue Raisonné

National Thrift Shop Day!!!!!

2010-08-17T19:21:00.019-04:00

I had to include a tribute to the place where my love of books really took off as a child. Nothing breeds a book glutton like being able to indulge, and second-hand stores are the only way a person of reasonable means - or their child - can afford to indulge like that. I wallowed in books as a child, happy only with a pile of reading material. It's still the way I prefer to read - several at a time, drifting between books whose spines are cracked mercilessly, page numbers committed to memory.

My most recent thrift shop purchase was on Sunday, at a charity thrift shop in a typically New Jersey location - by the side of an industrial highway flanked on one side by the outskirts of a ragged little city and on the other by horse farms. I walked in, spotted a slew of horse magazines and spent the next hour groveling happily in the shelves. I emerged with a stack of The Blood-Horse from 2009, a few Practical Horsemen from 2001, and Hemi: A Mule by Barbara Brenner (1973), which I'd never heard of and which is adorable.

It's funny, but even though thrift shops are the ultimate recycling method, outside of vintage clothing, shopping at them has never quite caught on even with the more crunchy people; thrift shops are still mostly for and about new immigrants and poor people. But what's better than people rehoming used but useful objects, saving money and landfill space?

Extraneous vintage comment
I grew up wearing hand-me-downs, and I really prefer new clothes, no matter how cute vintage is. I do appreciate a nice book about vintage, though, and recently came across a memoir Alligators, Old Mink & New Money which is very enjoyable. And I did find a flawless silk skirt for $6 at a Goodwill last month. Used or no, silk has a home with me.

Find a local thrift shop
Goodwill Industries
Habitat For Humanity ReStores
Saint Vincent de Paul Society
Salvation Army Thrift Shops

Also, hospitals, children's homes and churches often have thrift shops attached.

Odds 'n Ends

2010-08-12T20:30:00.011-04:00

Jim's eyes stuck out as much as those of the Sawhorse, and he stared at the creature with his ears erect and his long head drawn back until it rested against his arched neck.

In this comical position the two horses circled slowly around each other for a while, each being unable to realize what the singular thing might be which it now beheld for the first time. Then Jim exclaimed:

"For goodness sake, what sort of a being are you?"

"I'm a Sawhorse," replied the other.

Anyone using Google today will have noticed the Wizard Of Oz banner, commemorating the film's 71st birthday. Although they certainly do not qualify as horsey books, they do feature some equine characters (some more, some less), as with Jim the cab-horse and the Saw Horse in Dorothy And The Wizard Of Oz.

Baum, a prolific author, wrote an entire series of books set in Oz. To be exact, he created an entire series. After his death, the series was continued by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Among her books were The Giant Horse Of Oz (1928) and The Wishing Horse Of Oz (1935). The giant horse was a typically strange Oz creation, an immense wooden horse brought to life, but the wishing horse is an actual (if magical) animal.

The World Equestrian Games in Kentucky will feature not only country singers like Blake Shelton but opera star Denyce Graves. I may have to take back my harsh words.

And finally, a clip of a Ringling Bros. Circus horse act, as a prelude to an upcoming review of a memoir by one of the circus's veterinarians. This clip isn't the clearest, but there's something about that bold rush into the spotlit ring which just sums up the appeal of animals in the circus.

Paint The Wind (2007)

2010-08-09T00:10:00.009-04:00

I'm having some technical difficulties with my computer, which has quite reasonably refused to deal with my digital photo addiction until I give it more memory. So this review goes on sans cover image, which grieves me, but you can see the cover here.

Paint The Wind
Pam Munoz Ryan, il. Sterling Hundley (cover)
2007, Scholastic Press

"I have a grandfather and he lives with his brother and sister... but they're actually hillbillies with no education and they live like pigs in an uncivilized land. Oh, and they don't appreciate culture and are extremely crass and unsavory."

Maya, a squelched child, has lived most of her living memory with her father's mother in Pasadena. Her grandmother's grief and bitterness over losing her son early has led to the negative impression she's conveyed to Maya. When she dies, Maya is shipped off to Wyoming to live with her mother's long-forgotten family, the Limners.

She slowly turned in a circle and looked up at an endless and cavernous sky. There was far more heaven above her than there was earth below, and the horizon seemed worlds away. Without a white wall to define her boundaries, how would she ever know when she disappeared from someone's view?

Maya's learned to be silent and cunning under the autocratic rule of her grandmother; she flinches from the hearty, emotional welcome of the Limners, and lies fluidly to manipulate her circumstances. When she's sent off to a camp to spend time with her aunt Vi and spoiled cousin Payton, she employs her usual sly tactics to strike back after Payton throws a firecracker at her. Her tactics indirectly causes a horse to be hurt, and drives a wedge between Maya and Vi.

Slowly, things improve as Maya learns to ride and enjoy it, and learns about Artemisia, the mare her mother loved who was stolen away by a wild stallion. When Maya sees the chance to recapture the mare, she seizes it - and becomes involved in a natural disaster that could kill her.

The title is a fanciful expression of the allure of the wild horses and, no doubt, their threatened existence in reality. The title, cover art and comments about 'ghost horses' hint at a fantastic element which does not exist; the book therefore flirts with but never truly grasps hold at the supernatural. It is firmly in place, in love with Wyoming, and its heroine. The character of Maya is well done, but the supporting cast is under served and the relationships seem rushed. The initial segments set in Pasadena establish Maya strongly, but weaken and shorten the vital Wyoming sections.

Horse-wise, I have my reservations. The author is at pains to provide horsey details, and there is a great deal of horse information, including some convincing (if awfully quick) scenes of Maya learning to ride. But it doesn't feel as natural as the rest of the book. According to her website, Munoz Ryan hadn't been into horses until she began writing this book. She fell in love with riding, and her lesson horse Smokey is featured on her website.

Overall, I think it's a very high-quality work of children's fiction, but a not overly impressive horse book. And I actually don't mind. Maya is a subtle, interesting character, and her story is entirely sufficient.

Horses
Artemisia - brown and white pinto mare
Klee -
Wyeth - Artemisia's 2-year-old colt
Sargent - Palomino stallion
Russell - bay ranch gelding
Catlin - bay ranch gelding
Homer - bay ranch gelding
Audubon - dun ranch gelding
Seltzer - blue roan ranch gelding
Wilson - sorrel ranch gelding
Georgia - wild mare
Mary - 2-year-old wild palomino mare
Remington - black wild stallion with white blaze and stockings
Golly - dog

Links
Author website
Scholastic interview
McBookWords - the artists who inspired the horse names above
Illustrator Sterling Hundley's website

Other horse books
Riding Freedom

Jersey Shore, Barrier Islands and Pony Penning

2010-07-27T20:58:00.019-04:00

In case you've been living peacefully under a rock where the name Snookie means nothing , Jersey Shore is a reality show from MTV which follows a pack of trashy kids in their early twenties on their adventures in a shore town in New Jersey. Last year, Italian-Americans were displeased by the characters' endless use of the word 'guido' to proudly describe themselves and others as low-life, crass, obnoxious morons endlessly preoccupied by shiny things, not least themselves. This year, the story is how the wildly popular show is presenting New Jersey residents to the rest of the country, and Americans to the rest of the world. Leading to the currently high-profile governor of the state being jovially asked about the show's impact on his state's reputation.

The gist of Christie's reply:

"It takes a bunch of New Yorkers, drops them at the Jersey shore and tries to make America feel like this is New Jersey."

I promise this is horse-related.

Jersey Shore is shot at Seaside Heights, a shore town pretty much smack dab in the center of the Garden State's Atlantic coastline. I've been there and the show is accurate. Seaside Heights is one teeming mass of two groups of Americans you never want to get drunk and half-naked - New Yorkers and Canadians - amidst a general backdrop of nightclubs, bars, and a boardwalk scene from out of The Lost Boys.

But Christie's right. The New Jersey shore is beautiful. Even Seaside Heights. Like most beaches on the East Coast, it is on a barrier island. Barrier islands are long, flat strips of land lying just off the coast - their openness and general lack of trees or hills makes for an unlimited landscape that meets the endless vista of the ocean and act as a respite from the urban Northeast corridor.

Barrier islands occur naturally, though the exact process seesm to be debated among geologists, and they help protect the mainland from the current and the weather. Although most are very close to America's largest cities and the land generally has a high real estate value, there is still a reasonable amount of undeveloped land included. Partly, this is due to the inherent instability of building on borrowed sand, on what is essentially, a living piece of ground, one that changes with the wind and tide. Partly, it's because many barrier islands are too small and shallow to build on at all.

Which creates the phenomenon of the barrier island horses. Chincoteague, whose Pony Penning Day is this week, is the most famous, but there are herds of feral ponies and horses on barrier islands from Georgia to Canada. South Carolina's contribution, the Marsh Tacky, has just been made the state's horse breed. The National Park Service, which manages the National Seashore of Assateague and the National Wildlife Refuge of Chincoteague, also has a hand in the feral herds of North Carolina's Outer Banks, a long series of barrier islands off the coast of that state that gave these horses the name Bankers.

As with the mustang herds out west, barrier island horses have often run afoul of the government agencies charged with overseeing the public lands they typically inhabit. The National Park Service's priority is with the wildlife and the fairly fragile ecosystem of these islands, and argue that the well-being of the feral horses can come at the expense of both. Proponents for the horses say they can co-exist. The annual roundup at Chincoteague and Assateague are now a way to curb the population, as well as raise money.

And further north, Canada has Sable Island. Though not a barrier island (it lies much too far offshore to qualify and is instead classified as a continental island), I've included it because there's a very cute children's book by the mid-century writer/illustrator Margaret S. Johnson about Sable Island ponies.

But enough of that. What about books? Well, the first one is obvious.

Chincoteague/Assateague

Misty Of Chincoteague (1947) introduced the rest of the nation to Virginia's wild herd, and remains a classic children's book.

Marguerite Henry wrote four other books about Misty and Chincoteague Ponies: Sea Star, Orphan Of Chincoteague (1949); Stormy, Misty's Foal (1963), A Pictorial Life Story Of Misty (1976), and Misty's Twilight (1992).

Other books about that most famous of herds are:Hundred Acre Welcome by Ronald Rood (1967)and Charming Ponies: A Pony Named Patches (aka Patches) and A Pony In Need by Lois Szymanski (2008)

Hundred Acre Welcome, about naturalist Rood's adventures bringing a Chincoteague pony home to his Vermont farm, is due to be reprinted this summer from Blue Mustang Press, which also publishes Kendy Allen's The Ponies Of Chincoteague series: Misty's Heart Of The Storm, Misty's Black Mist And The Christmas Parade, Chincoteague Cowboy, The Story Of A Chincoteague Pony Named Misty III, and Ember's Story: The Misty Miracle Pony.

There are several picture books, including one by a very nice illustrator, Susan Jeffers - My Chincoteague Pony (2008); also Once A Pony Time by Lynne Lockhart (1992).

And a romance novel!

One Of A Kind by Jo Calloway (1983)

The wild herds of the Carolinas

A children's book reviewed here last year, Stephen W. Meader's Wild Pony Island. Outer Banks horses are also featured in the WWII-era children's adventure tale Taffy Of Torpedo Junction by Nell Wise Wechter (1957) which is now available from the University of North Carolina Press and the 2006 book Pale As The Moon by Donna Campbell Smith.

Sable Island

Pit Pony by Joyce Barkhouse (1990) and Dixie Dobie: A Sable Island Pony by Margaret S. Johnson and Helen Losing Johnson (1945) both feature Sable Island ponies. Pit Pony, which was made into a television series, will be released by Formac in a new edition on August 20, 2010.

Links

North Carolina - the Banker Horse

Wikipedia

Cumberland Island, Georgia

Tribe Equus

Gateway to the Golden Isles

Equitrekking

Chincoteague and Assateague

National Park Service website

The Misty of Chincoteague Foundation

Breed Organizations

The Marsh Tacky

Chincoteague Pony Association