A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Archaelogists are in town, digging up remnants of an ancient settlement, spurred on by the recent find of an Epona statuette. Meanwhile, Jinny is having visions of the settlement itself, in addition to nightmares of a Red Horse straight out the weird mural painted on the wall of her bedroom. What does the Red Horse want from her?

This installment thankfully avoids moralizing in favor of Jinny the wild child riding around the moors in reality and nightmare, present and past. Civilization seems to never completely take on her, and that as much as her closeness to Shantih, her Arabian mare who's never completely tamed, makes her the perfect candidate if some ancient horse-related magic needs to communicate with someone in the present.

The magical elements are deniable but not treated as such; while not everyone believes in them, Jinny isn't the only one who does and there's no real question in the book as to whether they exist.

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