For Love of a Horse (Jinny of Finmory # 1), by Patricia Leitch

[rachelmanija]

I discovered this book in a roundabout way. While prowling Amazon for classic children's books reprinted on Kindle, I noticed that Jane Badger Books was reprinting a bunch of classic horse stories. This led me to the Jane Badger blog, in which she reviewed a horse book every day for a year.

The Jinny books, along with Ruby Ferguson's Jill books, came up frequently as books which were much-requested but which couldn't be reprinted as she couldn't get the rights. The Jinny books were mentioned as having good prose, some magical elements, and a more flawed/realistic heroine than is usual in pony books. And lucky me, I just happened to already own the first one, which I'd bought at a library sale because it had a horse on the cover.

Written in 1976, the first book has some elements of gritty realism along with some that could only appear in a pony book. Jinny's father is a city probation officer in Stopton who is completely burned out by his inability to help the poor kids who get chewed up by the system. Naturally, he moves his family to a huge rundown house, Finmory, in the Highlands of Scotland, where he can pursue his dream of becoming a potter and his kids can ride ponies to school.

The middle child, Jinny, is all for that, as she loves horses. But when she sees a beautiful Arabian mare mistreated at a circus, she loses interest in the Highland ponies and becomes obsessed with rescuing her...

I liked this book enough to special order as many of the rest of the series as I could find (9 out of 12; not bad.) As promised, it has good prose, tons of atmosphere, and an intriguingly flawed heroine. I guess the magical elements appear in later books, as there's none in this one. Jinny is smart, extremely determined, and a talented artist; she's also obsessive, self-centered, and reckless.

The first book is much more about her than about the Arabian mare, Shantih, as through a wildly unlikely set of circumstances Shantih ends up running wild on the moors, with Jinny having about as much luck trying to tame her as is actually plausible. The supporting characters are vivid and also feel more like individuals than types; I especially enjoyed her burned-out idealist father and the vegetarian juvenile delinquent who helps them out and gives Jinny advice on horse-taming.

Note: Some cruelty/harm to animals but it ends happily.

Leaning into premise: Moderate. If this was the only book I'd say there isn't enough Jinny-Shantih interaction, but since it's the first of twelve I expect the later books to have plenty more.

What horse books have you all loved?

For Love of a Horse

Comments

[scioscribe]

This sounds lovely, especially as you have the near-guarantee of more horses later on. The gritty realism up front definitely gives the horse and moors romanticism more pathos.

I don't remember many of my childhood horse books by name, aside from Black Beauty, but then I Googled horse books and had an immediate "THAT ONE" response to seeing Billy and Blaze, complete with sensory memories of having taken it out of the library, so clearly that has stuck with me. I think what I want is basically Noel Streatfeild but with horses.

[snickfic]

Are you aware that there's a whole series of Billy and Blaze stories? I think there were five or so. I loved them all. That artist was really gifted.

[snickfic]

I read SO MANY horse books as a kid. Tons of Walter Farley stuff - I got far enough into the Black Stallion series that there were ghosts, aliens, an entire amnesia plot... I also read all the Marguerite Henry books and a bunch of books from the Saddle Club series, which came out at the just the right age. And a lot of stories about wild mustangs, I feel?

[nestra]

Yeah, me too on the Marguerite Henry and the Black Stallion series. I love seeing people discover exactly how weird that series got as it went on.

[aella_irene]

I read a lot of KM Peyton.

There was also one where I don't remember the details, but the heroine was getting lessons from a former show jumper who had had a crash and was now a wheelchair user, and his niblings were awful to her, including deliberately making sure she couldn't use the bathroom for her morning shower, and she went back to her room, simmered up to a boil, came up with a witty remark and went back to the shower... only to find the nibling had left and it was their urbane and confused father whose shower she was disturbing, which made her sink into misery.

[cyphomandra]

I love Jane Badger’s site! I have her Heroines on Horseback book. I also only read For Love of A Horse for the first time 2 years ago - I think I read one of the middle ones as a child and was a bit confused. Mine is a 3 in 1 book and I think I’m halfway through the next one.

There are so many horse books I love, but I have particular fondness for Mary Treadgold’s ones (esp The Heron Ride, but No Ponies and We Didn’t Mean To Leave Dinah are WWII horse books and fantastic), KM Peyton’s Fly-by-Night (grittily realistic about the actual difficulties of having a horse when your family are not at all interested), Nancy Springer’s A Horse to Love, Joanna Canaan (mother of the Pullein-Thompson’s) I Wrote a Pony Book, Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet, Monica Edwards’ Punchbowl Farm and Romney Marsh series, Lucy Rees’ brilliantly uncomfortable Horse of Air, and Mary Stewart’s Ludo and the Star Horse, which is in fact mainly about the Zodiac but has a fantastic horse and boy combination.

[st_aurafina]

KM Peyton’s Fly-by-Night - aaargh, that's the one I was thinking of, I thought it was a Patricia Leitch one. That was a good book.

[philomytha]

Jinny! I know I read the books to shreds when I was a pony-obsessed girl, but I can't remember anything about it now except that Jinny and Shantih were great and there was mysticism and showjumping. I think the mysticism is in the third book? I don't remember all twelve, I think I had two three-volume books, so six altogether, but obviously I was reliant on what my local bookshop and library had back then...

[queenbookwench]

I'm really curious about your process for finding old children's books that have been reprinted in e-book form--would you be willing to post about it in more detail?

One of my favorite horse book writers, who was absolutely everywhere in the 80s, but seems to have passed out of knowledge and memory, is Lynn Hall. Though interestingly, the most memorable book of hers from my childhood was _not_ a horse book, but The Solitary, which I read when I was probably somewhat too young for it, as it's about a 16/17 year old fleeing her abusive family, fixing up an abandoned house in the woods, and surviving by, among other things, raising rabbits and butchering them for meat.

[queenbookwench]

Also, thanks for the link to Jane Badger Books! I'm going to go check it out, as it sounds like a potential source, much like Girls Gone By Press, for some of my more niche interests.

And thanks for the link to the Malory Towers show in your last post--I had no idea that was a Real Thing What Actually Exists!

[ratcreature]

I read Black Beauty but generally wasn't into horse books, because I thought they were "girly" and hadn't gone through my feminist consciousness raising yet, to realize how toxic the whole "not like other girls" approach to feeling cooler was. So I snootily avoided the whole horse phase.

Though I also was kind of legitimately disgruntled at horses since my best friend at that age actually had her own horse, and that animal took up most of her time, so it was always really difficult to spend time with her as everything revolved around caring for that horse, and training with it and riding competitions on weekends. Then the one time I came with her, the animal was really kind of scary, and much larger than I expected too.

[sovay]

Shantih ends up running wild on the moors, with Jinny having about as much luck trying to tame her as is actually plausible.

Nice.

I was not in fact a terrific horse kid, but I believe I have burned up your comments about Marguerite Henry before. That said, one of my first completed and almost certainly least publishable stories involved a fictional nomadic horse culture. With telepathy. Since its writing predated my high school exposure to Mercedes Lackey, I have to conclude I parallel-evolved it out of a combination of Pern and, like, Rita Ritchie's The Golden Hawks of Genghis Khan (1958).

[edit] I forgot Mary Stewart's Airs Above the Ground (1965)! That is one of my favorites of her novels and has been since ever.

[musesfool]

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before but my very favorite horse book as a kid was "A Horse for X.Y.Z." by Louise Moeri (it was from one of those Scholastic monthly circulars!), which was also a wilderness adventure story! I also read a bunch of Marguerite Henrys (and Black Beauty) but no longer recall anything about them. *hands*

[silverflight8]

I am not a horse person but honestly this seems quite nicely iddy. I love that the response to being burned out is to move to the Highlands! Yes!!

[cgbookcat1]

I obsessively read the Saddle Club series (late eighties, early nineties) but no longer remember anything except basic facts about the characters. So YMMV.

[queenbookwench]

I was starting to end my Babysitters' Club-esque series phase when those came out, but I'm pretty sure I read and enjoyed the first few.

[queenbookwench]

Oh, I should add that another horse series I was quite fond of was the Linda Craig mysteries, which were basically "Nancy Drew + Western horseback riding."

[hederahelix]

I wonder if that was the series that I remember reading that I cannot quite remember the name of. I have a vague image of the covers of the books floating around in my mind--a sense that they were mysteries--and a really vague recollection that the protagonist had a gaited horse of a breed that I didn't know when I read the books (maybe a paso fino?).

I would say that I was worried I've made the whole thing up from some combination of wacky dreams and bad memory, but every other text I've remembered only bits about has turned out to be a real thing. And the name Linda Craig seems vaguely familiar. off to google!

Fantasy Horse-Punk Litterature

[frith]

These days I only read horse books. Magical, multi-hued talking horse books. Better than C.S. Lewis' A Horse and His Boy (that was a disappointment). They're all fanfiction books too, but the bridle does not make the horse.

I've read this 1,400 page book twice: Fallout: Equestria. It's a crossover between the Fallout video games and the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic canon. As with the game, it's set in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future environment, except with colourful talking horses fighting for their lives and few of them trying to build a better tomorrow. There's a free audiobook available, you can buy a paper edition here and a fancier more expensive single volume edition somewhere else... It's been printed a few times already. It has also spawned many books by other authors set in the same time and place. Fan fictions of fan fictions. Of note, Murky Number 7 (my copy is 2,667 pages long) and Pink Eyes (better to get the book, it was extensively edited for coherence).

But there is more. Background Pony, which turned up on the Boston University Faculty Holiday Recommended Reading list in 2018, with no true link on where to find it. It is about reverse amnesia, where instead of losing your mind and forgetting all your friends and family, everyone forgets who you are the minute they stop talking to you. With magical twists, of course. This is magical fantasy horse-punk. Love this book. My copy is over 1,000 pages long. You can get a copy here, or read it on FimFiction. There are probably free audio books and eReader compatible versions too. I only keep track of the paper editions.

Just as awesome but much shorter is Stardust at only 573 pages. It's another video game crossover, the game is something called XCom, about fighting off an alien invasion. I don't play any of these video games, but I do read science fiction. In this book, one of the protagonists from My Little Pony gets tossed into this war zone. She's obviously alien and doesn't speak the lingo but somehow she has to avoid getting killed and dissected and to find out how to get back home. You can buy that too! Right over here. I got mine via a crowdfunded print run, but as you can see, Ministry of Image is on the ball.

OK, one more. Project: Sunflower is short (515 pages) and sweet, fine for those with YA tastes. Earth has been hit with self-replicating nanomachines from space that are spreading and quickly transforming the biosphere into a black sludge. It's unstoppable. Fortunately, scientists have just discovered how to make portals to other planets. The bad news is that so far, none of them are habitable and time is running out. Then they discover Equestria and they need a volunteer to be torn down and rebuilt (via nanotechnology) to look like a pony and get sent over to gather intelligence. There are no paper editions in print right now, but FimFiction is free.

[em_h]

I remember developing very elaborate fantastical narratives about horses and forcing my sister and our (understandably few) friends to act them out over and over, but I think the basis for the horse characters was a beautifully illustrated non-fiction book about different types of horses. That book was one of my talismans, but I am sure, in retrospect , that it was so pedestrian that no one else has any memory of it, and that it has left little or no trace on the record.

In terms of narratives written by others, I read Black Beauty of course, and Misty of Chincoteague, but I was especially fond of a book about a racehorse who was injured and had to stop racing, and spent his later years having an intense equine bromance with a pony named Peanut. I must try to track that one down ...

[melita66]

Your mention of a retired racehorse and a pony called Peanut sparked a memory in my brain. Is it Old Bones: The Wonder Horse by Mildred Mastin Pace? It's about Exterminator.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/785597.Old_Bones_the_Wonder_Horse

Farley, Peyton, O'Hara, The Horsemasters, Henry, Anderson were all favorites. There were one or two boks about wild Brumbies? I also liked a short series by Logan Forster about an Apache boy named Ponce who finds an injured Thoroughbred mare and nurses her back to health. It's set in Arizona or New Mexico and when he goes to race her it's at Santa Anita rather than any of the eastern tracks. I don't think the writing quality has stood against my more sophisticated (hah) tastes, but I still have the books...somewhere.

[wordweaverlynn]

Black Beauty, which I had in a very abridged version but with pictures. Years later, I read the whole thing. Anna Sewell actually wrote it for adults, but it's still a great horse book.

King of the Wind, of course, and all other Marguerite Henry books.

My Friend Flicka, which I read in the Readers Digest condensed version. I had some issues with the book and suspect I'd have more today. I'll find out soon, since I just ordered a copy.

[st_aurafina]

I loved the Jinny books as a teen - an older girl gave me a box of pony books which was basically an amazing miracle to me. I adored Jinny and Shantih, and the books kicked off an interest in Celtic mythology. Jinny was very different to the protagonists of other horse books - she got moody, she got her period, she made mistakes, she wasn't really very good with horses and had to learn her way. I loved her. I read all of her books to pieces. (Just running my eyes down the list books gives me a weird squirm. Adolescence is very strange and intense, you know?)

Pullein-Thompson sisters are very by rote, absolutely formulaic and I devoured them by the hundreds. They're like the Enid Blyton of pony books - hundred and hundreds of basically the same story. They weren't very good? But they were plentiful.

Ruby Ferguson's were different, but of the same era - I remember ponies got hurt in these books, there were great consequences. I think I loved the horses in these books more than in the Pullein-Thompson stories??

I loved Monica Dickens' books, though they were kinda horse-adjacent. The Messenger series was about a grey horse spirit that would magic the main character into another person's body to help solve a mystery.

Lorna Hill who wrote the Sadler's Wells ballet books often had horsey characters in her books, and a few books that were set in the same universe but not ballet themed. She had a very fannish, id-tastic way of writing that teenage me loved. (Those were the Patience books.)

Also in this vein: International Velvet, the movie, starring Tatum O'Neal. And Christopher Plummer and Anthony Hopkins. I wore my VHS tape out.

What is it with adolescence and ponies?

[shewhostaples]

Oh yes, I was going to mention Lorna Hill. I mostly read her for the ballet (and occasional Ruritanian princesses), but there's plenty of horse content.

[ethelmay]

Monica Edwards is wonderful, though her first couple of books (like Wish for a Pony) are not nearly as good as she gets later on. But they also get less and less horse-centric.

[cyphomandra]

Yes, what I like about her books is more the characters, setting and the sense of community rather than the horses, but the horses are still great.

Have you read her standalone career novel, Rennie Goes Riding? It’s surprisingly dark - the main character has PTSD after her mother’s death, and is determined to work with horses despite everyone thinking she can’t hack it, and all these horrible things go wrong (e.g. at one place the dealer she works for drugs horses to make them more saleable, and one of them then kills the boy whose father buys it)

[hippogriff13]

Mary O'Hara's "My Friend Flicka" (which I think somebody already mentioned) and the sequel, "Thunderhead." This is about Flicka's son, Thunderhead, who is born with a near-untameably wild nature and uncoltishly adult proportions (i.e., his legs look unnaturally short compared to the usual long, spindly legs colts typically have). Despite this unpromising start, Thunderhead eventually matures into a magnificent stallion who winds up as the leader of a band of wild horses living in a box canyon in a particularly obscure bit of Wyoming wilderness. Here's a slightly more detailed précis of the plot, cribbed from one of the book's Amazon reviews: "Ken's mare, Flicka, has a white colt, a throwback to its grandfather, the wild and wicked stallion, the Albino. His father hates the Albino and thinks no good will come of any of its progeny. Ken loves the colt regardless. The colt is so ugly and has such a scrabbling gallop that although [Ken's] mother named it Thunderhead, it gets known as The Goblin. The Goblin escapes out onto the range and isn't seen again for a year, when it demonstrates such an unusual gait and such speed that Ken secretly thinks he has a racehorse who can help the money problems his parents have on the ranch. [This turns out to be at least somewhat true.] The story continues with problems between Ken and his father, between Thunderhead and Banner, his father's range stallion, and between Thunderhead and the Albino."

There was also another horse book I loved, which I thought was called something like "The Horse from the Sea." However, when I checked Amazon the only book by that title turned out to be a different one by Victoria Holmes that I'd never read. Anyway, the book I'm thinking of was about a teenage girl who finds a beautiful gray stray horse wandering loose (on the beach, I think). After various financial and logistical struggles, she manages to find a way to keep the horse, which she names Sabre, and ride him in competitions. I think she's actually had the horse for a couple of years (and bred him to an acquaintance's mare) by the time she and Sabre make enough of a splash on the equestrian circuit that the horse's wealthy long-lost owner (who had previously thought Sabre had been killed in the accident that resulted in his roaming around loose) comes out of the woodwork to reclaim it. The girl consoles herself by raising and training Scimitar, the talented but much less sweet-natured filly sired by Sabre (whose original legal name I believe turned out to be Gray Cloud, or something like that). After two or three years Scimitar has in turn made an impressive enough showing in various competitions that when the girl goes back to Sabre's rich-guy owner and offers to trade Scimitar for Sabre, the original owner indulges her by agreeing.

I think this book was originally published in the U.K., although when I checked Amazon.co.uk I still only found the same more recent(?) unrelated book by Victoria Holmes under the title I associated with it. At any rate, the book was published in paperback in the U.S. sometime in the late 1960's or early '70's. I remember that the edition I found at the local camera store in NYC (which also sold paperbacks) had a turquoise-tinged blue cover framing a picture of the girl and the horse--I believe in their first encounter on the beach. I tried Googling the book by listing some of these plot points, but got nowhere. So if anyone else recognizes this book and knows the real title and/or author, I'd love to hear about it.

[rachelmanija]

Is this it?

http://skunkcatbookreviews.blogspot.com/2009/11/sabre-horse-from-sea-by-kathleen-herald.html

[shewhostaples]

There is a lot of horsing in the non-Kingscote Marlows books, though I didn't get to them until adulthood. I used to love the Norman Thelwell comics.

[oracne]

I was way into Marguerite Henry, Walter Farley, and the Trixie Belden series.

[sholio]

I had completely forgotten that there was so much horse stuff in the Trixie Belden books (I wouldn't have called them horse books, but now that you say it, I realize it's true) but that was probably part of their appeal for me, along with the secret club and clubhouse, and the tomboy heroine. Those books were totally the Nancy Drew of my childhood; I loved them and owned, if not the entire series, then at least every one of them I could get my hands on.

[snacky]

Black Beauty, The Black Stallion books (as mentioned above, they got weird), and of course, Marguerite Henry. My school library had the complete collection, and for some reason I was totally obsessed with the Misty biography and checked it out so often it was only my name on the card.

While I was writing this comment, two other books popped into my head, that I hadn't thought of in years! Summer Pony and Winter Pony by Jean Slaughter Doty. I can remember the covers so clearly, and how much I loved the story of Ginny and Mokey.

[kathmandu]

Summer Pony and Afraid to Ride are the ones that spring to my mind. Plus of course Misty of Chicoteague. I had one titled King of the Wind (less pony, more race-horse) but it may have been a bit old for me; I struggled to keep my attention on it.

[littlerhymes]

Oh I loved the Jinny books, thank you for bringing back these old memories! I don't think I read them all but there were a few I read over and over.

I loved horse books as a kid. Can't remember them all now but definitely Black Beauty, Black Stallion, My Friend Flicka, Silver Brumbies... There was also a series of Black Beauty spin-offs by the Pullein-Thompson sisters which I LOVED.

[carbonel]

I loved Dorothy Lyons' Connie McGuire books: Silver Birch, Midnight Moon, and Golden Sovereign.

Much later, I read some of her other very-out-of-print books, courtesy of interlibrary loan, but they weren't as enjoyable, and I don't just think it was reading them as an adult.

I also loved Heads Up! by Patsey Gray. I read that when I was young enough not to ask about other books by the same author, which is rather a shame, since she apparently wrote several others.

[indywind]

OMG I think you’ve just reintroduced me to one of the few horse books I could remember the plot and characters of, but not the title or author, so it was lost to me until now. If I recall correctly, the copy I read had a lurid, 70s pulp style watercolor painting cover with hardly any visible horse, just Jinny on the moor stalking a distant equine silhouette, instead of the photo your copy has. BRB, Off to look for a used copy.

My favorite pony books, besides the usual well-known and regularly republished ones, are Jean Slaughter Doty’s less-known titles.