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“My Friend Flicka”: A Book About Horses That Is a Book About First Love

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Rebecca Mead writes in the New Yorker about rereading My Friend Flicka as an adult and sharing it with her son:

One of the privileges of parenthood is re-reading beloved books from childhood with one’s own children, in spite of the sometimes pronounced stylistic gulf that exists between kid lit of earlier eras and that of today. (I doubt that, in the age of the Kindle free sample, Arthur Ransome would get away with a first chapter quite so replete with sailing arcana as he did, in 1930, with “Swallows and Amazons.”) But when I picked up “My Friend Flicka” again recently, to read it aloud to my ten-year-old son, I did so with some trepidation. What might the book, a realist family drama set in the American West of eighty-odd years ago, mean to a city child who, given a free rein, selects action-packed fantasy series—in all of which, it seems, a group of children, miraculously untethered from the influence of their parents, undergo adventures in a supernatural or dystopian-futuristic world, battling the forces of evil on behalf of the good? Besides that, how would “My Friend Flicka” read to a child whose exposure to horses is so limited that he doesn’t know a fetlock from a forelock?

So, yes: there is some unfamiliar horsey terminology—discussion of corrals, and sires, and lariats, and so on. (There’s also a rather gruesome chapter about the process of gelding, the discussion of which has made an interesting addendum to fifth-grade health class.) But the life of a child on a horse ranch is so wildly different from that of a child who rides the G train daily that the book’s realism—the spaciousness of Ken’s day-to-day existence—reads like fantasy. In the opening chapter, Ken has just returned to the ranch for the summer from boarding school, and is alone, on horseback, at dawn, surveying the land. “From here he looked west over a hundred miles of the greengrass; and south across the great stretch of undulating plateau land that ran down to Twin Peaks, and beyond that across broken crags and interminable rough terrain, mysterious with hidden valleys and gorges and rocky headlands.” When we got to the part of the book in which Ken and his brother Howard go out hunting rabbits—with their own guns—my son’s eyes widened with disbelief.

But the most compelling aspect of “My Friend Flicka” is not the external drama of Ken’s life, though there is plenty of that. (A mountain lion stalking the range looms as a perpetual threat to man and beast.) What makes it the perfect book for a boy on the cusp of puberty—particularly a dreamy, distracted, and imaginative boy on the cusp of puberty—is Ken’s inner drama. While the book is ostensibly about horses, its true subject is first love.

via “My Friend Flicka”: A Book About Horses That Is a Book About First Love – The New Yorker.

How About: Two Reissues? Flambards + The Edge of the Cloud

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Flambards and The Edge of the Cloud by K. M. Peyton were both reissued and rejacketed by Oxford Children’s Books this year.

flambards

First published in the late 1960s and set around the period of WW1, this pair of novels will appeal to readers who fancy a change of tempo and mood from brash contemporary teen fiction. They can also be appreciated by adults who enjoy reading Edwardian period fiction filled with horse riding and plane flying. Peyton’s writing is immaculate. The second book was awarded the Carnegie Medal.

A third Flambards novel appeared soon after, and a fourth title a few years later.

In an excellent recent Guardian feature, it was  said: “There are shades of Downton Abbey in Peyton’s sweep from the top of the social scale to the bottom…”

Here is a chronological list of her titles:

      • Sabre, the Horse from the Sea – 1947
      • The Mandrake, A Pony – 1949
      • Crab the Roan – 1953
      • North to Adventure – 1959
      • Stormcock Meets Trouble – 1961
      • The Hard Way Home – 1962
      • Windfall – 1963
      • Brownsea Silver – 1964
      • The Maplin Bird – 1964
      • The Plan for Birdsmarsh – 1965
      • Thunder in the Sky – 1966
      • Flambards – 1968
      • The Edge of the Cloud – 1969
      • Flambards in Summer – 1969
      • Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer – 1970
      • Fly-by-Night – 1971
      • The Beethoven Medal – 1972
      • A Pattern of Roses – 1972
      • Pennington’s Heir – 1974
      • The Team – 1975
      • The Right-Hand Man – 1977
      • Prove Yourself A Hero – 1978
      • A Midsummer Night’s Death – 1978
      • Marion’s Angels – 1979
      • The Flambards Trilogy – 1980
      • Flambards Divided – 1981
      • Dear Fred – 1982
      • Going Home – 1982
      • Who, Sir? Me, Sir ? – 1983
      • The Last Ditch – 1983
      • Pennington– A Trilogy – 1984
      • Frogett’s Revenge – 1985
      • The Sound of Distant Cheering – 1986
      • Downhill All the Way – 1988
      • Plain Jack – 1988
      • Who Sir, Me Sir ? – 1988
      • Skylark – 1989
      • Darkling – 1990
      • No Roses Round The Door – 1990
      • Late To Smile – 1992
      • Poor Badger – 1992
      • The Boy Who Wasn’t There – 1992
      • The Wild Boy and Queen Moon – 1993
      • Mr. Brown – 1995
      • The Swallow Tale – 1995
      • Snowfall – 1996
      • The Pony That Went to Sea – 1997
      • Windy Webley – 1997
      • Unquiet Spirits – 1997
      • Danger Offshore – 1998
      • Firehead – 1998
      • Swallow Summer – 1998
      • Swallow the Star – 1998
      • Blind Beauty – 1999
      • Pony Stories – 1999
      • The Paradise Pony – 1999
      • The Pied Piper – 1999
      • The Scruffy Pony – 1999
      • Horses – 2000
      • Pony In The Dark– 2001
      • Stealaway – 2001
      • Small Gains – 2003
      • Greater Gains – 2005
      • Blue Skies And Gunfire – 2006
      • Minna’s Quest – 2007
      • No Turning Back – 2008
      • Far From Home – 2008

Josephine Pullein-Thompson – obituary – Telegraph

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Josephine Pullein-Thompson – Telegraph Obit.

Josephine Pullein-Thompson, who has died aged 90, was a horsewoman and author – pursuits which she blended into an extraordinarily successful career entertaining a generation of preadolescent British girls with ripping tales of gymkhanas, hunt balls, riding club mishaps and “dud” ponies-turned-champion rides.
Her ability to transform mucking-out and saddle soap into literary gold — she wrote dozens of pony novels over the course of half a century, beginning with Six Ponies in 1946 — was in fact a family trait. Her mother, Joanna Cannan, had been credited with single-handedly inventing the “pony club” novel during the 1930s; and her sisters Diana and Christine — with whom Josephine initially co-authored — were also virtuosos of the genre, each publishing numerous equestrian adventures.

via Josephine Pullein-Thompson – obituary – Telegraph.

‘A Hundred Horses’ and ‘Horses of the Dawn’ – NYTimes.com

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Two children’s books reviewed in the New York Times

A HUNDRED HORSES
By Sarah Lean
217 pp. Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $16.99. (Middle grade; ages 8 to 12)
“Lean’s imagination runs wild, but her descriptions of a girl who rediscovers hope and wholeness remain firmly rooted in truth.”
HORSES OF THE DAWN
The Escape
By Kathryn Lasky
219 pp. Scholastic. $16.99. (Middle grade; ages 8 to 12)
“Sometimes the fantasy goes too far. The horses talk to one another — and deer and macaws — in ways that can seem preposterous. (“By my withers!” is a common equine exclamation of disgust.) “

via ‘A Hundred Horses’ and ‘Horses of the Dawn’ – NYTimes.com.