A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

"Perdita Smith" is discovered at the bottom of a well with assorted fractures and total amnesia. After what in retrospect was the world's most perfunctory search turns up no clues to her identity, she is taken in by friendly nuns.

When driving with a nun, Perdita sees someone riding and remarks that she rides well, and so realizes that she knows something about horses. In the hope of getting a clue about her identity and also because she needs a job, she obtains a position at a local stable with a bad reputation (all the good ones were highly suspicious of her lack of credentials).

There she meets the manipulative owner, the owner's sullen teenage son, the owner's sweet young daughter who's terrified of riding, the sexy asshole who's the son of the dead previous owner, the golden-boy rider who's some relation I forget, the drunk stablehand, and a kitten who sneaks in at night to cuddle with Perdita and sneaks out before she can get a good look at her. The kitten was my favorite character and I was very aggravated that Holland forgot it existed at some point and we never get a good look at it.

If you have read any books by Holland involving a romance, you know that whichever hot dude initially appears to be the biggest asshole is going to be the love interest. (He may actually be an asshole, but he won't have actually murdered his wife.) Sexy asshole it is! Perdita whipsaws so much on whether she thinks he's evil or not that at one point she says "Though I hated him with every fiber of my being..." and I had to flip back to confirm that Holland had indeed lost track and the previous scene had Perdita deciding that he was clearly a good guy who was being blackmailed.

The amnesia and riding parts of the story are lots of fun, especially the subplot involving the girl who's scared of riding. (The kid does, in fact, have zero interest in riding as a sport, but Perdita gets her onboard by getting her to bond with her horse as a friend.) The suspense bits were distinctly pasted on yay.

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"The Phantom ain't a hoss. She ain't even a lady. She's just a piece of wind and sky."

Very unusually, given that most prologues are dreadful, the prologue of this book, which details how shipwrecked Spanish ponies came to the island of Assateague, is one of the best parts of the book. It's vivid and immediate, and tells a great story in a very few words.

Several hundred years later, it's become a tradition on the island of Chincoteague to round up the wild ponies of Assateague, make them swim across, auction off some of the younger and trainable horses, then swim the remaining ponies back to Assateague. Paul and Maureen, a young brother and sister on Chincoteague, have their heart set on buying the near-legendary wild mare, the Phantom.

There's some beautiful descriptions and great horse-related moments in this book, but the Paul-and-Maureen story is incredibly aggravating. Paul is constantly getting on Maureen's case for being a stupid useless girl, and no one ever stands up for her. She never gets in on any of the heroic action, and the one time she actually gets offered some respect--the kids break a wishbone to see who gets to ride in a race rather than just automatically having Paul ride--OFC Paul wins and Maureen admits he'd ride better anyway.

Copyright 1947 and honestly, considering the number of horse girl books from that time, retrograde even for then.

Misty is adorable but I can see why I didn't hang on to this book, or remember much about it.

Misty, who is a filly (female), is called Phantom's son on the back cover of my edition, which is a modern one with a different cover than pictured. Scholastic, you should be ashamed of yourself.

After a storm and landslide opens up a previously hidden valley containing a herd of prehistoric wild horses, a girl rescues an orphan foal who turns out to be key to enabling her veterinarian mother making a vaccine for a horse pandemic.

This was one of those books that I read, then forgot the title and author, then searched for vainly for ages before finally getting rescued by Jane Badger, the woman who's currently reprinting a bunch of classic horse books as ebooks.

Yesterday's Horses has a lot going on for a short book, but it's seen from the point of view of one girl on one farm, so it doesn't feel overstuffed. This likewise enables the pandemic to not come across as crushingly grim - horses die, even horses she knows, but we don't actually see any of that happen, and the focus is first on her raising the adorable prehistoric foal, then on her attempt to save her own horse when he gets sick. (Spoiler, he makes it).

It's more of a "I raised a wild animal, then gave it a bittersweet release back into the wild" book than a "rocks fall, all the horses die" book. Though I do have to note that rocks falling is the reason the foal was orphaned in the first place.

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

A children’s book from 1972 about a girl who acquires a loaner pony for the summer that she and her mother are staying in a cabin in the country.

I had thought this book was one I’d read as a kid where a girl discovers a valley full of wild horses, but in fact it’s one I hadn’t read and she discovers a herd of tame ponies owned by a neighbor. (Now I wish I could figure out what the “girl discovers a valley full of wild horses” book was.)

It’s got just enough realistic horse detail to feel believable and is full of the joy of ponies and exploring. There is the threat of horse death when some ponies get stolen to be sold for horse meat (!), but it’s okay, they get rescued.

One of the things I like about reading older books, especially ones that aren't considered classics of their genre, is the window into ordinary life at the time. I was born in 1973. I remember when I was 6 or 7, I used to walk to friends' houses, to candy stories, etc, by myself. These weren't long trips, maybe a couple blocks. But it was nothing unusual. All my friends did that too. This was in various parts of Los Angeles, mostly in neighborhoods that were not the greatest. I now never see unaccompanied children.

In this book, the heroine, who is about ten, rides her pony on trails around the countryside by herself, and is sometimes gone all day. Of course most girls would not have their own pony, loaner or otherwise, but I do remember that in the summer I could disappear and do my own thing all day, so long as I took a lunch and was back before dark. There's a lot of things about my childhood that were terrible but the chance to explore alone was one of the few I'm still grateful for.

The Valley of the Ponies

A middle-grade novel about a girl in a hospital who sees winged horses in the mirrors, then climbs over the wall of an abandoned garden on the grounds and finds a horse with a broken wing.

With a premise like that, how can you go wrong? Well--once you ask yourself that question, the ways become obvious. I will say that this book is quite beautifully written and is obviously doing exactly what the author wanted it to do. There is no shortage of craft. It just managed to hit multiple points which are not objectively bad, but which I really dislike. Spoilers for the entire book follow. ( Read more... )

An Amazon reader who also found it depressing wrote, On the positive side, the story gives us a good look at how many children's lives were lost before vaccines came into existence.

The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

A Dangerous Thing, by Josh Lanyon.

Los Angeles mystery writer Adrien English goes to a lonely cabin in the woods to relax and get over his frustrating non-relationship with hot but closeted cop Jake Riordan. (This is the second book in a series, and I didn’t read the first, but presumably that’s the one where they met.) Since this is a mystery, Adrien immediately finds a body, which proceeds to mysteriously vanish. The locals suspect him, so it’s Jake to the rescue! A playful mystery-romance, with lots of banter, sexual tension, and hurt-comfort.

A Dangerous Thing (The Adrien English Mysteries Book 2)

Knockdown, by Dick Francis.

Jonah, a bloodstock agent (horse dealer, basically) discovers unethical practices in the trade; despite increasing levels of menace and violence, he refuses to go along with it, putting himself at higher and higher risk. Meanwhile, his alcoholic brother still refuses to go to AA. But on the bright side, Jonah meets a beautiful air-traffic controller…

This typical Francis set-up goes in some unexpected directions. It’s the darkest of his books that I’ve read. They can deal with some very serious subjects, like grief and depression, but are not grim. The protagonists are put through the wringer, and good people and horses may die. But villains don’t prosper and heroes come through battered but wiser, with a better grip on their own issues and often with a budding romance with some interesting, independent woman.

This is the only Francis book I recall which does not have a happy or at least hopeful ending.

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Knockdown

Re-read. This has one of Francis’s best premises, and the execution lives up to it. Neil Griffon, an antique dealer, has temporarily taken over his trainer father’s stable after his father was seriously injured in a car crash. Neil is kidnapped by a dangerous madman who demands, on pain of destroying the stable, that Neil hire his son Alessandro as a jockey… and let him ride their prize stallion in the Kentucky Derby.

The theme here is fathers and sons. Neil’s father was emotionally abusive and distant, but competent in his own sphere; Neil, forced to step into his shoes, must gain the trust of all the employees who prefer his father. Alessandro’s father is a sociopathic megalomaniac, but gave him everything he ever wanted. The heart of the book is the relationship between Alessandro and Neil, an oddly paternal one though Neil is only 15 years older, and Alessandro’s growth into becoming his own person.

Excellent suspense, plus Francis’s usual good characterization of the supporting cast. My favorite here was Etty, confident in her place as a female “head lad” in a male-dominated profession. Though Francis doesn’t use the word “asexual,” Neil describes her as having no interest in sex. The phrasing isn’t sensitive in current terms, but the sentiment is nonjudgmental.

One of my favorite things about this book was the way that Alessandro seemed to have stepped out of an entirely different novel, one where the arrogant and damaged young man is the romantic lead, and was forced to interact with Francis’s down-to-earth characters, who either didn’t notice how hot he was or noticed but didn’t let it cloud their judgment. His interactions with the no-time-for-this-shit Etty were comedy gold.

Warning for horse harm.

Re-reads, but it's been so long since I read High Stakes and Nerve that all I really remembered was that I didn't think they were in the top tier of Francis's books. Dick Francis is perfect for when you really want to read about someone having a worse day than you are. I may have bronchitis, but at least I'm not suicidally depressed/fighting off an axe-wielding criminal while I have a broken wrist/blindfolded, chained, and soaked in freezing water.


Blood Sport is the most interesting of the three. The plot isn't as well-tuned as his norm, with an unusual amount of low-stakes wandering around looking for clues, but the hero makes it memorable.

Gene is a former James Bond-type secret agent turned private eye (unusually for Francis - his heroes tend not to be professional hero types) suffering from long-term, severe depression. He spends a lot of the book trying to convince himself not to commit suicide. Treatment is never mentioned, and he seems to think it doesn't exist - at one point he muses that some day depression will be recognized as a disease, and babies will be inoculated against it. Originally published in 1967, when there most certainly were treatments for depression. However, to this day many depressed people never seek treatment, so I believe that Gene wouldn't.

In the first and best action set-piece, Gene's boss invites him on a boating trip, where Gene meets the boss's sweet 17-year-old daughter and saves someone's life in what appears to be, but of course is not, a boating accident. The boss gives him a job - hunting down a missing race horse in America - with the clear intent of keeping him too busy to off himself. There's a semi-romance with the teen daughter of the "I'll wait till you're 21" type, of which the best thing I can say is that it's less squicky than usual. There's a much better non-romance subplot involving a woman Gene's age who seems to be a standard unstable, alcoholic sexpot, but who is then given actual depth and a very satisfying storyline.

The pieces of this book don't fit together as well as Francis learned to do later. Gene has a helper who needed better characterization for his storyline to really work, and the final action climax isn't that climactic. But the depiction of depression is very realistic, and it's a good example of how to write a depressed hero without making the book itself depressing to read.

Nerve has an excellent A-plot, in which Rob Finn, a struggling jockey from a family of musicians, is the target of a plot to undermine his career. This book is impossible to put down starting from the first paragraph, in which a jockey shoots himself in front of Rob.

The B-plot, in which Rob tries to court his true love who won't marry him because they're cousins, is less successful. Francis is a bit hit-or-miss with romance. Some of his romances are fantastic. This one never quite worked for me - Joanna's "totally cousins" objection seemed a bit ridiculous and lampshading it didn't help. I never quite bought their relationship.

But the slow disintegration of Rob's career is nailbitingly readable, even though there's no physical jeopardy until about halfway through. The showpiece action sequence, in which Rob is kidnapped, blindfolded and chained, drenched in water on a freezing night, and must free himself and then race the next day, is brilliantly done. Nice comfort via hot soup afterward, too.

I had totally forgotten High Stakes before I re-read it and I can see why. Even now, it is fading from my memory. A toy inventor gets mixed up in some mystery involving racing and... um... wow, I honestly cannot remember more and I read this 48 hours ago. The romance is with a woman whose sole characterization is that she's American. The only parts I remember are the toys, which are cool, and an action sequence in the toy workshop.

Panelists: Rachel Manija Brown, Cora Anderson, Janni Lee Simner

Please forgive or correct any errors made in these notes. They were typed quickly and in shorthand, and I made them legible and comprehensible as best I could. But they are not 100% complete or accurate.

R: What was your introduction to the idea of companion animals?

J: Pern! And imaginary friends when I was growing up

C: The She-ra horse! When I was six, I had an imaginary friend who was a winged unicorn named Starlight with a rainbow mane, who could turn invisible and go to school with me. Oh, and Pern also.

R: Dragonsong I used to think up lists of names ending in -th. I mostly had blue and green dragons - the sidekick dragons. I always liked the sidekick characters. Also, I used to tame wild animals when I was a kid. You can tame a feral cat in about six months, if you’re patient.

R: What is the appeal of a companion animal (telepathic or not)?

R: I was obsessed with animals, and you get into an emphatic empathic communion when you sit for hours with feral cats. Telepathy goes right to the heart of that. Also, there’s a powerful draw in the idea of a creature that can understand you perfectly. At least, there is when you’re as a kid.

C: There’s something about creatures that not only understand you but love you regardless. Pern dragons never say 'fuck this noise, I'm outta here,' no matter what you do). McCaffrey has said Pern is inspired by the feeling, as a five-year-old, of getting a pet. You want the pet to be a perfect friend, and it just wants to be a cat. It's what you want from a childhood pet, then a boy/girlfriend, that you can’t have. It’s the wish fulfillment that something can understand you completely.

J: As an outcast child with no close friends until later, imaginary friends always were there for you and also wanted to do what you wanted. Best friend + subservience.

R: Should we jump into subservience?

C: The Heralds of Valdemar. In those, the Companion will in fact repudiate you and leave. The Pernese bond is unbreakable. In other ones, the animals don't have human morality. The Companions are metaphors for guardian angels; they won't condone serial killers. It’s a different type of relationship.

R: Don't forget they are sparkly magic white horses.

C: It’s the dream of a horse, not a real horse.

J: When I first rode a horse, I was disappointed. They weren't flying!

R: Judith Tarr said Anne McCaffrey based dragon Impression on watching humans with young horses. Of course a real horse is much more rebellious.

C: And can't talk.

J: But then you can believe they understand you perfectly. If they can’t talk they can’t contradict that feeling.

R: Going back to the idea of companions as metaphors for other relationships…

J: Childhood wish fulfillment animals. I get much less interested when it becomes metaphors for adult relationships, but fiction seems more interested in that.

R: Romantic relationship with everything but the sex... and sometimes they do include sex, hopefully not with the animal. The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik has dragons in the Napoleonic wars. Those dragon-human relationships are very much like a good marriage, complete with falling outs, but if the humans have sex, it doesn’t affect the dragons, and vice versa.

C: I've read the first book - that's the one where the relationship is seriously romantic. Another rider treats his dragon as an aircraft, and the dragon just wants to be loved. The rider gives it more baubles and thinks that’s all it needs. It’s classic unrequited love, complete with pining.

J: Most bondings happen with adolescence. It’s a stand in for coming of age/romance.

R: Before the panel we were talking about Ariel, by Stephen Boyett. It’s maybe not that good of a book objectively, but it’s interesting. The hero is a teenage boy in a post-apocalyptic world where technology has been replaced by magic. He bonded with his unicorn when he was twelve, when the book starts he’s nineteen. The virgin mythology is real. They fight sometimes. It’s definitely a romantic relationship. But he can't have sex with anyone, woes. At the end he does, and the unicorn leaves. It’s clear that unicorns are better than sex.

C: And then there's Pern, where you have to have sex. [Audience indicates that they’ve almost all read Pern.] When the dragons do it, so do you. NO EXCEPTIONS!

J: You are forced to the dragon’s schedule. How do they feel when the humans are still at it?

R: The Pern books actually mention that. I think it was meant as id wish fulfillment, but it comes across as problematic, McCaffery used just enough realism that it seems creepy.

C: She's said in interviews that these are not romantic relationship, but in the books, the dragon’s partners are almost always the humans’ partners. So, you start getting sex = love. It makes the concept of choice more problematic.

J: Also one-sided.

R: Pern has very contradictory canon. The dragons are color-coded by gender. Green dragons are always ridden by men, and they’re always female. The only dragons with female riders are gold, and they’re extremely rare. So most dragon-mating would also involve men having sex with men. But it took 10 books for McCaffrey to be explicit about that.

C: I totally didn't notice that when I was nine.

R: I think the dragon mating is meant to be the wish-fulfillment of being utterly swept away by passion. It’s an appealing fantasy, but the execution highlights the creepy aspects: rape is love

C: There’ve been thousands of discussions about this. There’s the 70s trend of romance novels that start with rape. One theory is that in society where it's not OK for women to want to have sex, it's an out so that you don't feel like a “slut.” [Sarcasm scare quotes.] It can be a safety net if you don't own your own desire. Is the dragon mating flight the same thing? “It wasn't me, it was the dragon!”

R: Animals are close to nature, so it may also be the romanticized idea of that. You don’t have to worry about social restrictions. Let’s just all bone!

J: Do any books go the other way? Where the animals and people have to discuss whether they want to have sex?

C: Arrows of the Queen, sort of. A girl is bonded to stallion. Sex is not stigmatized and they are not compelled to have sex when the other, but they can tell. “Could you warn me next time? I'm in the middle of something, and then really?” They negotiate the timing.

R: The C. J. Cherryh Finisterre novels. (Rider at the Gate) We should discuss these more when we get to parodies and dark takes. On this planet, animal life is telepathic and empathic, and can overwhelm humans. Certain people can bond with night horses and put up mental shields. Sex transmits both ways. But it’s not overpowering, you can go with it or not. There’s one scene where the rider wants sex, and the horse is bored.

C: If your companion animal is comparable intelligence to you, what does it mean that the human is the decider?

J: Except in Valdemar.

C: It’s not always the case, but most often. Dragons have no choice in Pern. They have to do what they are told to do, no exceptions.

J: A Swiftly Tilting Planet. There’s a flying unicorn and a boy; neither are making solo decisions.

Audience: In Pern they are bonded, but choices are built into the environment

C: In Temeraire, dragons are human-level smart but subservient. Later in the series they start trying to get voting rights.

R: In other parts of that world dragons are equal to humans, or even superior.

R: Wolf companions are interesting because authors tend to use older research that turned out to be incorrect. The concept of the alpha wolf comes from wolf behavior in zoos. In the wild, the wolf pack is actually a family: a breeding male, a breeding female and pups. It’s not about constant fighting for dominance or rape.

J: A happy family of wolves. I want to read that.

C: Ya'll can talk about sex, I'm talking about Jhereg. It’s got a snarky flying lizard. AND IT’S AWESOME. It’s extraordinarily loyal, but will tell you that you're stupid. It’s much more realistic, like real friends. Not a creepy “I love you forever and everything you do is awesome.”

J: So you need your perfect friend companion, and your companion who will give you advice and call you out.

A: Sabriel: Mogget and the Destructible Disreputable Dog.

R: A kind of subversive version is Diana Wynne Jones’ Dogsbody. Who is whose companion? Sirius the Dog Star is a powerful being in the form of a tiny dog. It’s told from dog’s point of view, and the girl is actually called a “companion.”

C: Other books where the animal is the POV character?

J: Maybe the Valdemar short stories?

A: The Princess and the Bear

A: Traveller (Not fantasy.)

C: Does the bond need to be magical? I was explaining to my mother-in-law what I was doing at Sirens and since she doesn’t read fantasy, I explained what a bond animal was. She is blind and has a guide dog, and asked whether her guide dog was a ‘bond animal.’

J: Even in fiction it’s not always a magical bond, now that you mention it.

R: Sure. Pern is what first comes to mind, but Robin McKinley is next. She has very emotional relationships with non-magical bonded animals. She also has service animals. If you look at Deerskin and The Hero and the Crown, there are points where the heroine is badly wounded or sick, and her horse or dog acts as her service animal.

J: In Tamora Pierce’s books, everyone ends up with animals. They’re not always magical.

Audience: Have you read the Mountain's Call series by Judith Tarr, with the horses? (The Mountain's Call; under a pseudonym.) I loved Pern, but not so much for the sex issues. I read Valdemar, but the companions a bit too much – it’s a great relationship if you fall in line. In Tarr’s series, she really nailed the perfect horse relationship. No one is in charge. There are Gods in horses bodies, but they act like horses.

J: Tarr has a YA book, House of the Star, with magical horses. [Under a pseudonym.] The protagonist asks the horses why they need humans. The horse says humans can think around corners.

Audience: No one was better than anyone else. No subservience.

J: You get something bigger than the sum of either.

C: Question time!

Audience: Friendships vs. Partnership? Dealing with Dragons books.

R: I didn't think of those because I would think of them more as two characters, not an animal companion.

C: In those, the human is the companion animal.

Audience: Back to sex! There are books with deep romantic but non-sexual bonds with animals. Everyone avoided using the word asexual. Is that conscious, that the human is in an asexual relationship? Or is it just bestiality avoidance?

C: In most examples the characters do have sex, just not with each other. I hadn’t considered the idea of bond animals as asexual relationship. That’s a good thing to think about.

R: Yeah, it’s interesting. I didn’t think of it because the partners are usually sexual, but with others.

J: That would be a good opportunity for exploration.

A: It could be a model of an asexual partnership.

A: Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes, is a book where you only get a companion animal if you were bad. If people saw it, they knew you did something wrong.

R: We didn't get a chance to talk about it, but there’s a little subgenre where the animal companion is a part of you, a manifestation of your soul. Zoo City actually had a little take on The Golden Compass included as a fake academic paper.

Audience: There’s the Firekeeper series. (Wolf Captured (Firekeeper)) Would that count as companion animals? Girl raised by wolves. She can't remember who she is. One of the wolves is her best friend. They even have thoughts of 'if we were the same species, we'd be together' but it's not weird. They can speak, but not telepathically; the way wolves speak. Is that a companion animal?

J: Raised by wolves is a trope on its own.

Audience: She thinks of herself as a wolf. When she’s found by humans, she insists she is a wolf. Her relationship with the wolf does become romantic but not sexually. It’s an example of a romantic asexual relationship.

J: There’s a wide range of ways of dealing with this. It hasn't been explored enough.

R: If ya'll go write it, there are lots of places to explore.

J: The animals are always the good guys.

R: No! If you want to see evil companion animals, read Sheri Tepper’s Grass. The companion horse are evil aliens. The Cherryh books I mentioned earlier have a parody of the special girl with a special bond. It doesn't go very well.

Audience: Recommends Yuletide fics that were dark interpretations of Valdemar.