Raise your hand if you were a Horse Girl. It’s ok, this is a safe space. Honestly, I was one too. If you’re not familiar with a concept of the Horse Girl, here’s the breakdown: a Horse Girl is that girl in your 5th grade class who is obsessed with horses. Horse Girls are found most commonly between the ages of 6 and 16, though if left untreated, this condition can often continue into adulthood.
Often the Horse Girl has never seen a horse in real life, or if she has, has no concept of the work and cost of actually caring for a horse. Horse Girls talk a lot about the freedom and beauty of these creatures, or about how intelligent they are. They often fantasize about getting married barefoot on top of a hill and riding off on a horse into the sunset. Girls who regularly care for horses, raise horses, or compete with horses are no longer Horse Girls. One positive side effect is that the Horse Girl is the only person who knows how to draw a horse. Talk to your children about Horse Girl syndrome today.
I most definitely was a Horse Girl. My grandparents kept horses, but even though I’d spend weekends grooming their Shetland Pony, Honeybear, and picking up manure, I was abysmal at competing, and had a lot of fantasies about riding bareback through fields.
The other thing about Horse Girls is that there is a whole genre of books dedicated to their interests. These books are full of willful children who discover true friends in horses, the only other animal apparently capable of an almost-human level of intelligence. As you may have guessed from this series, I did not read many of these books, but my impression is that no matter how much inside-horseball talk there is, or how long it takes for child and horse to actually bond, the book can and should always involve a bitchin’ horseriding montage.
Which is why My Friend Flicka is a bunch of horseshit.
The book begins with 10-year-old Ken riding Cigarette, what I assume is a goth horse, through his family’s ranch in Wyoming. Ken is always daydreaming, forgetting to do his chores and his homework, and now he is at risk of getting held back a grade. This doesn’t really matter to Ken, who spends all his time thinking about what it would be like if he had a colt of his own. (Note: This book uses the term “colt” the way most people use “foal,” that is as a young horse of either sex. Typical usage has “foal” for either sex, “colt” for a male, and “filly” for a female. O’Hara’s interchanging usage is extremely confusing and makes me question whether she was a real Horse Girl, though who knows, it was probably different in 1941).
Ken’s dad, Rob, doesn’t want to give him a horse and is constantly grumbling about Ken costing him money and being irresponsible and not doing his chores, but I don’t know man, what else did you think having kids was like? I know you wanted sons to work your land on the cheap but maybe you should have just saved up and hired some adults. So Rob is grumpy, but just as soon as it seemed Ken was doomed to a summer of extra schoolwork and tense moments with his dad, his mom, Nell, steps in and convinces Rob that maybe giving Ken a foal to care for will teach him responsibility.
I want to take a moment to talk about Nell, who is by far one of the most interesting (I hesitate to use the term Strong, for some reasons) female characters I’ve encountered in YA. Nell’s story is that she’s a hardworking farm woman with a New England background, and a degree from Bryn Mawr. She bakes her own bread and knits, then goes on hikes to seek solitude and shoot rabbits. She spends the whole book seeming to long for something, whether it’s for her husband to understand Ken, for the daughter she will never get to have, or for her life back north. This is something I particularly appreciated, since there are too many narratives to count about city kids who wish to be free in the wild west (“too many to count” = “I can only think of Newsies right now but I know there are more”). It’s nice to see someone who can love the mountains, and still miss life in the city.
Nell plays the part of the good farm wife by providing food for all the men around her and making sure everyone is taken care of, but beneath it O’Hara depicts a sadness, and a desire to be more than what she is. O’Hara writes:
It has amused Nell at first to be addressed as Missus, but it had not taken her long to learn that, here in the West, it meant “the woman,” with all that word signified of gentleness and motherliness. Here, in her world of men, husband and sons, hired men, haying crew, horse buyers, to be the Missus meant to be that before which they could remove their hats, and bend their heads. In the cities a woman could turn herself into a driving machine, or harden herself to meet difficulties, but the Missus on a farm or ranch, though she might be milker of cows or trainer of horses, must be more and not less of a woman for all of that, or she would rob the men around her of something which was as sweet to them as the sugar in their coffee.
When we complain about Pick Up Artists, or Nice Guys bitching about the “friendzone,” this is the feeling we’re talking about. It’s a world that sees women not as their own agents, but as props in the story that men have crafted for themselves. If she became a “hardened” woman, or stopped being gentle and motherly, she would be “robbing” these men of something they believe they’re entitled to, rather than making her own choices. Her inability to adhere to this lifestyle would be a crime. So Nell goes on her walks to watch the sunset by herself, or drives into town to see a movie alone. She makes decisions and watches as her husband gives orders over her. She lets the farm hand take an axe from her because he thinks a woman shouldn’t cut wood while there are men around to do it. Every time she speaks I can hear her sighing.
As Nell mentions, she is surrounded by men, the foremost of which is her husband, Rob. Rob could easily be featured in Dad Magazine. He’s gruff and tries to raise his sons with tough love, and in his more playful moods chases his wife around their porch or makes some comment about how strong she is. He seems to understand that Nell and Ken have a deeper connection, and is honestly distraught by how much his son seems to be scared of him, so he quickly takes her advice and lets Ken choose a foal.
Ken chooses Flicka, a fast horse with a strain of “loco” blood from her mother, who was never able to be fully broken. There’s a lot of talk about how she’s beautiful but unbreakable, fast but unreliable, but Ken doesn’t care and makes his dad and the farmhands reign her in. She, being a wild fucking animal, becomes scared of the humans chasing her and tries to run through a barbed wire fence, which leaves her with bad wounds and infections.
The rest of the book is just Ken bringing his sick pony some oats, petting her, telling her how much he loves her and how she is his and he will take care of her forever, in language that I am sure would not be out of place in an Otherkin messageboard. Ken is very serious about his love for Flicka, and she seems to reciprocate (“She loved his hands, his touch, his caresses…They looked into each other’s eyes as lovers look,” I MEAN). Eventually she learns to trust him and do what he says, but she remains sick and her infections are causing her to lose weight. Eventually Rob gives the orders to his farmhand Gus that, at some point when Ken isn’t around, Flicka needs to be put out of her misery.
(By the way, there is also a whole subplot about a mountain lion that’s terrorizing surrounding farms and I just, I don’t even care, it is so boring. The mountain lion kills a foal and a cow and then Rob shoots it. The end.)
Ken then decides to spend one last night with Flicka, sneaking out of his room and cradling her body in a cold stream as she dies. Because for about a full chapter, O’Hara leads us to believe Flicka dies. She uses the words “she died,” and you’re thinking “great, now I’ll never get my bitchin’ horse montage” and think about watching Fly Away Home instead, because no it’s not horses but it’s still animals and humans accomplishing something together!! Gus comes to find Ken shivering in the water and carries him home, then comes back to find Flicka is actually still alive.
So now Flicka is getting better and Ken is sick, and the next chapters are just Ken in basically a coma and Flicka learning to walk again. And you think maybe, just maybe, they’ll both get better and reunite and ride off into the sunset. No. You know what happens? Ken, still sick, is driven out to see Flicka, and upon seeing her regains some strength and starts running toward her, and Flicka starts running toward him, AND THAT’S IT. He never rides her, or trains her, or gets to stick it to his dad and his asshole brother that he got the best horse and they were idiots to have doubted him. No, he just gets to run toward a horse. I can run toward a horse. Central Park is across the street from my office and any day I want I could jog over and spook one of the mares pulling a carriage. I won’t, but you are not special, Ken!
Tell me, Horse Girls, that there are other horse books that include scenes of children riding free with their horses, after they have learned to communicate solely with their eyes. Tell me that there are books that at least involve a relationship between human and horse that exists when they are both healthy, because I cannot take a horse book with another disappointing ending. Though maybe it’s different if you’re really into horses. To be honest, I was a pretty shitty Horse Girl. I couldn’t even draw one.
Tags: jaya catches up, jaya saxena, my friend flick, my friend flicka was the book moe read to the sick children in that simpsons episode, ponies
This is only marginally related, but Jaya, HOW DID YOU KNOW I WAS THINKING ABOUT SADDLE CLUB TODAY. How? (They are horse books, but also preteen girl squad books about friendship and boys and stuff. And horses! And snobby rich girls! They are great. There is a lot of actual riding of horses.)
Signed,
A Horse Girl who also rode and cared for horses a lot and has never read or seen My Friend Flicka because she cannot handle even the possibility of animal pain/death in books, whether or not it actually exists
I was also thinking about Saddle Club today! Creeeeeepy.
Saddle club!!!!!!!!! I had such a crush on Stevie, that carefree but meticulous dressage champion! Loved those books so hard. Girl friendship. Horses. I very clearly remember the one where Carole gets Starlight, the one where Lisa’s mom buys her a red jacket for a show bc she doesn’t know it is inappropriate, and the one where Stevie got to be the fox in their humane fox hunt.
Signed,
A wannabe horse girl who did get to go on two trail rides at local resort’s stable for 10th/11th birthdays after A LOT of begging.
I think I thought of them today because “O Little Town of Bethlehem” came on my Pandora and I thought about the one where Stevie and dude (dude name?) go on the Nighttime Christmas Trail Ride and he starts singing it. How do we remember these things?
Phil? I think he went to another school or stable or something? Stevie goes crazy trying to teach her horse how to do “flying changes” because he can do them with his horse.
Relatedly, it was through the Saddle Club that I learned what dressage was, which greatly impressed my boyfriend when it came up during the whole Ann Romney and Rafalca thing.
Those Saddle Club books were THE SHIT. But my real jam was the Thoroughbred series. I read every single one. There was even one where the main character is grown up and she is pregnant now and gets kicked in her belly by a horse ON CHRISTMAS so she has a hallucination of her future daughter’s horse-filled life and that’s the what the book is about???
I loved the preteen girl squad aspect of Saddle Club. All OVER it. And while I was not thinking about Saddle Club today, I was thinking about Black Beauty for some reason! Eerie!
There was a SC television show, too! It was a Canadian/Australian co-production, if I remember correctly, and everyone had Australian accents and I don’t think it really stuck much to the books, but it was glorious.
I used to watch that when I was babysitting my cousins, who were absolute Horse Girls! The guy who played Max was super hot.
I had the theme song from the TV series stuck in my head all day yesterday!
And now today.
My grandmother is really into Sad Dog Stories and Sad Horse Stories and Sad Wild-Animal’s-Brush-With-Humans Stories, and I think you can draw a direct line between my unsupervised access* to these books as a child, and the grimly oversensitive person I am today.
*Oh, but definitely don’t let me watch any TV, guys! A+ parenting priorities!
D:
True story: Last night I whapped my cat on the nose because she kept scratching our record collection, and I saw her sorta make that “mrrrph” face when you do that to cats, and then I picked her up and started crying because I didn’t want to hurt her.
I loved animal books as a kid, but I was also very sensitive and could not STAND sad endings. So when I got a book of Real Animal Heroes stories, my mom went through for me and marked the ones where the animal died at the end so I could skip them. Twenty years later, we jointly refused to see “War Horse” until we could confirm that the horse lives through the movie. Love you, Mom.
My family and I also refused to see War Horse until we were assured that the horse makes it to the end–I’m glad we weren’t the only ones! I loved My Friend Flicka, and the Black Stallion books, and Misty of Chincoteague, and all the other horse books mentioned here. My dad read Black Beauty to me when I was little, but we had to take a break in the middle because he got too choked up to read. I’d like to read it to my niece and nephews one day, but will probably run into the same problem–maybe we’ll put that one off for a few years!
I’m trying now to think about books with happy pony-relationships (not *that* kind), but I am drawing something of a blank unless you go back to the UK ones – the Pullein-Thompson sisters are the archetype for it. Then there were the Jill books by Ruby Ferguson or the Jinny books by Patricia Leitch. Mostly out of print now but findable! It’s a very common theme though, nursing either horse or human back to physical/mental health.
And have you read the other Flicka books? If not, go forth at once and do!! There is more!
I think Misty of Chincoteague was kinda happy, right? I could be totally off in my recollection, and the whole “capture and sell the wild ponies” thing is problematic, but it seems like the Misty/kids relationship was good.
Well, wild ponies have to be rounded up and something done with them, otherwise they breed like rabbits, get too numerous for the food available and end up deformed and incestuous and starving to death. So I’m at one with that element of it from a practical point of view – I ride on the roundups in the New Forest in the UK and get the wild ponies in, and I do know it has to be done from a welfare point of view.
But yes, the Chincoteague books are pretty untraumatic! (And it’s up there on my list of places to go and see the ponies!)
We took a pilgrimage to Chincoteague two summers in a row for the round-up and auction. For a kid who loves horses and birds (there are a lot of neat sea birds) it was a really overwhelming and awesome experience minus the jellyfish stings I got when we went clamming. A year or so after the second trip my parents bought an older Chincoteague pony more for my sister’s benefit. She was the true Horse Girl between the two of us. I just wanted to draw poorly rendered horses and re-read the Chincoteague series than compete.
Misty!
She’s been taxidermied (sp?) and is in a museum in Chincoteague. There’s your trauma!
JILL! JINNY! OH MY GODDDDD. Everything I know about everything, I learned from horse books. How to Whitewash walls! How to be a boyish girl! Literally, can we talk about these books some more? I loved them so much.
Who doesn’t love Jinny and Shantih! (Although I was always quite partial to the Highlands.)
There is the entire Thoroughbred book series, and also Saddle Club, and the inevitable, beautiful, perfect, Misty of Chincoteague series. Anything by Marguerite Henry, really. All of them. So many damn ponies.
http://mistyofchincoteague.org/
I was not a horse girl, but I was raised by Horse Girls and I have Strong Opinions on them, opinions like “GET OFF MY FOOT GET OFF IT RIGHT NOW OH GOD.”
I was not a Horse Girl (in fact I happily scorned them, because I was a very scornful child), but I remember a conversation on the Hairpin, maybe a year ago, about how there’s a connection between preteen girl horse obsessions and burgeoning sexuality that I cannot find. Any of you guys remember what I’m talking about? Or maybe just want to hash out now?
I don’t remember this at all but I am INTERESTED.
All I can remember is that there was something to do with the need for freedom, of finding an exclusive and deep relationship with something strong and beautiful, of taming something wild and being the only one to master said wildness and find one’s own wildness within oneself, and sometimes of healing past abuses. There’s also something to be said of how one needs to spread one’s legs and work in perfect tandem with *cough* something so strong and fierce and tender that has chosen you and only you.
I would also venture to posit that Horse Girls ending up wasting a lot of time on Jordan Catalano types a few years later.
But he leeeeeans…
(just wrapping up a re-watch marathon, btw)
His hair is very mane-like.
Hey, has anyone had any luck finding this?
I can run toward a horse. Central Park is across the street from my office and any day I want I could jog over and spook one of the mares pulling a carriage.
I had a slight case of Horse Girl, and I think this story actually sounds pretty sweet (except for the “they looked at each other like lovers” part because what?), but I certainly did crack up at that.
My Horse Girl book was Midnight Dancer, about which I can now remember nothing but the cover. My case of Horse Girl never got cured though – it just lay dormant until I was earning enough money to develop it into the more serious (expensive) condition of Horse Riding Lady.
You haven’t read the Black Stallion? Misty of Chincoteague? King of the Wind? These are beginner Horse Girl Books. Whatever you do, don’t read Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, because it is super sad.
Mary O’Hara’s biography is interesting too. And there are a couple more Flicka books, as stated above.
Aw yessss, King of the Wind. Loved that book. sidebar: that book introduced me to Ramadan. The more you know, etc.
I read my copy of Man o’ War to pieces. Literally. Walter Farley was my hero.
I was absolutely a Horse Girl. I could draw horses, but I almost never got anywhere near them, and I think I suffered all of the other symptoms you listed above. I did finally get some riding lessons and mucked stalls for them, and I was on my way to growing up to be a horse person until my car accident meant no more mucking stalls.
My Horse Girl crack-books were the Silver Brumby books. I had my cousins mail them from Australia because you could only get the first two in Canada. I don’t know if that makes me a bad Horse Girl, though, because there are pretty much no people in the books, and when there are they’re the villains trying to capture the pretty pretty magic horses.
Oh, Thowra!!
Did you know there’s a Silver Brumby movie streaming on Netflix?????? It is meh, but SILVER BRUMBY! (I named one of my Breyer horses Tambo after I read them….)
I KNOW WHAT I’M WATCHING TONIGHT (I had a Breyer horse named Thowra, although he was an appaloosa because I liked them more than palominos)
Horse Girls are the same as Dragon Boys.
I apologize for the gender-binary-ness of this statement. Obviously girls can like dragons too and boys like horses. But the relationship between the human and the animal (horse/dragon) is usually the same. (A special connection, superior animal intelligence/understanding, the human gets to ride the animal when the animal decides that the human is trustworthy, etc.)
I don’t know what it means, but it seems important.
I was definitely a Dragon Girl as well as a Horse Girl. The place that venn diagram converges might be Pegasus-Unicorns.
Oh my god yes. Pegasus unicorns. I used to pray so. hard. that a tram of pegasus unicorns with rainbow manes would sweep down to the kindergarten yard and whisk me away from those other 5 year old cretins, to freedom amongst meadows of stars. My prayers were never answered.
I was almost a Dragon Girl, but never quite. My relationship was always deeper with the books themselves than any fantasy I had about bonding with the creatures in them.
I guess I was a Book Girl.
Also not a Horse Girl, but I was a good enough friend to a few of these types to indulge their galloping around during non-Horse-related activities such as Hide & Seek. I was really into the book “Rascal” though and I’m just now realizing that I was probably a Raccoon Girl.
I LOVED RASCAL. Even with the bittersweet ending! Did you read “The Wolfling” too? I was all over that. Ah, Sterling North.
I didn’t! I can’t believe I missed the chance to be a Half-Dog/Half-Wolf Girl! I’m going to have to go creep around in the Young Adult section of the library yet again…
McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown has a great young woman/horse relationship…other stuff too, but the girl and her horse-ness is strong with that one…
$#%^&*() I still have The Blue Sword. I redact my earlier opinion. Also, that book features a Girl and her Giant Hunting Cats rather than dogs, which appealed _strongly_.
…. unfortunate about the orientalism.
I have to tell you, I was really into the Thoroughbred series when I was growing up. Ashleigh is who I wanted to be more than anyone (she was the bomb, trust me) and rode racehorses on her parents’ breeding farm in Kentucky. I was a hardcore Horse Girl (now, a Horse Woman), and I require/d a steady stream of hair-flowing riding montages to get through the days.
Thoroughbred was absolutely the best!
My stepsister and I loooooved those books! They got weird later on, around book 40(?) or so, I remember wondering if the ghostwriters were fighting amongst themselves because it kept jumping back and forth between racing and eventing, and the Christina and Melanie years had strange continuity issues.
OH MY GOD, THOSE BOOKS! I remember having one and the paperback had had the pages tipped in wrong so there was a whole section missing.
Pretty much every Black Stallion book has a minimum of two riding montages, usually A Ride for some purpose in the plot that leads up the second ride, which is A Race.
How did I find the only book without a montage? I’m the worst.
I’m about 80% sure that there is a Black Stallion book that involves aliens (20% sure I imagined it) and it also has a ‘plot ride’ and a ‘race ride’.
Wikipedia says you are correct!
The Island Stallion Races (1955) – Two aliens from another world enter the secret valley of Azul Island and offer Steve an opportunity for Flame to compete against the world’s fastest race horses.
So bizarre!
Is that also the one with the rabies?
That was also an Island Stallion book, but I don’t think it was the same one as the aliens.
That was also an Island Stallion book, but I don’t think it was the same one as the aliens.
Steve! I loved Steve! I always wished for more Steve in later Black Stallion books, but no dice. 🙁
And then you get the cracked out hallucination filled ride through the swamp in The Black Stallion’s Ghost and the IDEK WTF was going on with the apocalypse stuff in The Black Stallion Legend
Yeah I’d vote for the Black Stallion books or Black Beauty; there is some serious “children riding ponies gleefully around an English estate” going on there. I was the Horse Girl all through school, then became a riding teacher and got acquainted with the smelly, hot, muddy realities, and now am still, proudly, at 24, a Horse Girl who wants nothing more than to gallop bareback through a huge field.
Horse girls use “reins,” not “reigns” when they are reining something in.
More obscure YA horse books! Does anyone remember Everyday Friends or Somebody’s Horse?
My mother bought me Somebody’s Horse and I turned my nose up at it for some reason. Not sure why, I should see if I still have it so I can give it a chance again. I was way too into Saddle Club and Thoroughbred at the time, I think.
Also, The Monday Horses and The Sweet Running Filly series.
I definitely read The Black Stallion and Misty of Chincoteague, and I think perhaps My Friend Flicka, but that might have been just the movie. I was not a Horse Girl, however, or even a Horse Boy, because the fact that my sister had horses, and they chased me around the corral when I was trying to lug a very heavy (for a 10 year old) pail of water to the chickens kind of cleansed me of all sense of romance toward horses.
My sister definitely was a Horse Girl up to the point where she actually owned a horse (and its filly eventually). She had Saddle Club books lying around, but they didn’t seem like they were meant for the likes of me, so I didn’t read them.
If you are looking for heartwarming horse fiction aimed at girls… and you’ve already read all 8,490,573,482,957 saddle club books, try these: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2667939-the-se… http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2986568-a-hors…
Those are the two I remember reading to death.
I was a total Horse Girl and I never read My Friend Flicka! But the Saddle Club books, the Misty of Chincoteague books, the Black Stallion books, the lesser-known Linda Craig series (she had a GOLDEN PALOMINO named CHICA D’ORO and the books were like Nancy Drew plus horses)…. all way, way less traumatic than this.
Also Black Beauty, which is far MORE traumatic. But even that ends well!
YES MISTY OF CHINCOTEAGUE and all of those sequels that is all.
I am afraid of horses and am thus kind of afraid that I will have a daughter who is a Horse Girl.
I read lots of horse books (I had an older cousin who was horse nuts), but my real love was dog books. Dog books! Did anyone else read the hell out of some Jim Kjelgaard? Wild Trek! I LOVED Wild Trek, and Stormy, and all three of the Big Red books. And Albert Payson Terhune’s Lad, A Dog, and Lassie Come-Home.
I only read the first Big Red. Where The Red Fern Grows?
Definitely read all the Jim Kjelgaard I could get my hands on, especially the Big Red ones
Also, Lad of Sunnybrook and all those books.
I was a Horse Girl, and then I went (begged my mom to let me go) to horse camp for a week, wherein I learned that horse poop is real and you don’t get to start galloping five minutes after you get in the saddle, which totally crushed my “riding across the prairie with my hair blowing in the wind” dreams. After that I stuck to the Saddle Club.
…that said, last week we definitely went on a sleigh ride and I definitely spent half of it making reference to Almanzo Wilder driving 40 miles in his cutter to pick up Laura.
I am both glad and appalled that Flicka has made it into this series. I remember loving it with all my heart and, on reflection, it was kind of bullshit. But guys, also FLAMBARDS. Oh Oh, and my favourite YA/horse book ever ever ever is Can I Get There By Candlelight which is also a TIME TRAVEL book about friendship and is perfect in every way.
um, Darkling by KM Peyton was a crucial point in my development: horsey girl HAS SEX.
Yes! I remember that one!
DO YOU oh my god I thought I was the only one who had read it! Hillary! Sidesaddle! etc.
Trufax: my friend in elementary school ordered a horse on the internet using her mom’s credit card. It was, like, the first thing any of us had seen bought on the internet.
Her mom only found out about it when the guy called asking where she’d like the horse delivered. We were truly Horse Girls.
Okay, THAT\’S metal.
WHAT WEBSITE IS THIS!?
I legitimately think it was hosted on Geocities. My memory might be failing, but it could be that some dude was just up and selling ponies on the Great Big Interweb for the first time. And apparently accepting 10-year-olds with Mastercards as customers.
I was such an enthusiastic wee Horse Girl that my parents took me to get my picture taken with Cass Ole, the main equine actor in “The Black Stallion.” Seventeen hands, an enormous beast of an Arabian. And of course there were the books, Misty of Chincoteague and King of the Wind (not many years ago, a friend took me to dinner at a very schmancy restaurant, and she was startled at how pleased I was that our table was under a print of the Godolphin Arabian) and their ilk.
As an adult, I don’t seek out horse-oriented fiction as much, with the exception of Jane Smiley’s superlative Horse Heaven, but a good riding scene is a jewel. The scene of Aubrey riding little Yamina across the desert in Patrick O’Brian’s Treason’s Harbor hit the sweet spot of beautiful and realistic dead on. “The boy had pushed his horse ahead; she could not bear it, and Jack felt her grow tense. He gave her her head and she instantly changed pace”–once you ride that feel you will be a Horse Girl until your soul departs your body.
I am so jealous you met The Black. I watched that VHS tape until it stopped working.
I saw it again a few years ago and couldn’t believe how well the scenes on the island held up. The rest, eh, it was okay, but the wordless sequences of Alec and the Black running along the beach? Bliss.
That scene…so amazing….best thing in the movie. I think it is actually one of the best thing in a movie, period. My 13 yr old daughter has refused to watch the movie…apparently finding the whole horse thing quite meh. I continue to search my house for her discarded pod.
HORSE HEAVEN!!! All the scene’s written from Justa Bob’s perspective? Justa masterpiece. 🙂
Have you read Barn Blind?
I was never a Horse Girl, but for some reason I wished I could be, and sort of regretted not being able to muster the proper interest. I went through the motions – took one riding course, learned to draw them pretty decently – but even though I enjoyed those things well enough, my heart just wasn’t in it.
The horse obsession = sexuality theory discussed above would explain a few things, actually.
i was absolutely a Horse Girl, although i did actually ride and owned a couple of horses (can you even really own a horse? yes, yes you can). i read all of the saddle club books, but i honestly think what started it was Pit Pony, which is about a Boy and a Pony, and came out a couple of years before i started riding/spending all of my time at the barn.
as @ilikemints mentioned upthread, horses were absolutely starter-relationships for me, as were backstreet boys, if i can date myself (1997 was a good year to be 13, is all i’m saying). deep emotional connection with a being that will never hurt you (emotionally), and is therefore safe to love? holla!
i think my mother was just glad that as i reached the age of dating, i was way more interested in spending weekend evenings at the stable, with the gang of (mostly) girls there, gossiping in the tack room and eating cup noodles.
I was the worst kind of HG: the really know-it-all one. We certainly couldn’t afford to have a horse (holla single-wide trailer!), but the library had books! So many books! I once informed my parents at age 7 “I know how to ride a horse, I’ve read ALL ABOUT IT.” Fact: upon actually riding a horse, it turned out I did not actually know how to ride one.
But for about a year, we had one that we boarded with a friend, and he was barely broken, and I needed a faithful old plug, not a flighty mostly-Arab dingbat who hadn’t been saddled in years. Thank god for helmets, because I was thrown about once a week. Eventually, Cusser was let go, and I was a horseless Horse Girl once again.
And then, for a brief magical six months, my neighbors boarded their horses in our pasture, and I had the faithful old plug I needed at age 16, and I had a job, and a boyfriend, and a car, and a HORSE TO RIDE WHENEVER. You guys, it was the absolute best part of my life thus far.
(and then the horse, who was actually a grumpy QH mare, kicked my brother’s german shepherd between the eyes and I felt bad for laughing but he definitely deserved it and then the neighbors fenced in their pasture and my beautiful dream with Bonnie was over.)
Once I told my mom I needed a dictionary and walked out of B. Dalton’s with
Oh, I was a Horse Girl. In fact I think I’ve read every single book mentioned on this list, aggghhh! At our library there was even a sticker of a running horse on the back of all the kids’ books that featured horses, and I would just go through and pull ten off the shelves, take them home, read them all, and then demand to be taken back to the library. (My parents limited me to 10 books at a time, mostly because I would lose them under the bed/outside/in corners/under couches etc if I had too many to keep track of.)
I was most definitely a Horse Girl. Had a horse riding birthday party, went to horse camp when I was in Brownies. But I was never that into horse books, because I read one in primary school and am permanently traumatised to this day.
Any other Aussies read Jodie’s Journey by Colin Thiele? He’s a very well known Australian author who writes YA fiction, but frankly this book should not be allowed to be read by anyone!
It’s about Jodie, who is a girl who is a show jumping champion-her life is her horse and riding. And then, after getting mysterious pains and swelling in her joints in diagnosed with juvenile arthritis. So her dreams are shattered and she has to come to terms with not being able to ride ever again, plus the usual teen embarrassment of needing a wheelchair etc.
Now, this book is set in 1983, in summer. This is when the devastating Ash Wednesday bushfires happened in south Australia and Victoria. You guessed it, Jodie just happens to stay home from school, and is trapped and alone as huge fires roar towards her house! She has to save herself and her horse from the fires, even though she can barely walk, and she has to try and ride the horse even though she’s in so much pain but she can’t and the horse gets spooked and bolts and it’s all just so harrowing, I’m having flashback describing it! Thanks for the lifelong emotional trauma from that, Thiele.
Has anyone else read A Sporting Proposition, by James Aldridge? There’s less soulful gazing into ponies’ eyes, but it has horses, children, a trial, class tension, small town drama, all kinds of good stuff. And it’s set in Australia! No idea if the author himself is a real Australian–any Aussies on the Toast ever hear of it? And for an adult book that’s not directly about horses, but has some great horse-related scenes (galloping across the English countryside included!), check out Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey–I reread that book every year or so, even thought it’s technically a mystery, just because the writing is so good.
I was never a Horse Girl, but I read Perdita so many times. Amnesia! Mystery! Romance! Detailed accounts of horse grooming and stable politics! http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5638292-perdit…
My sister is a Dog Girl. Really obsessed with them.
I didn’t hate Flicka, but loved the follow ups. The Green Grass of Wyoming (Flicka book 3) is one of my favorites! Ken gets a girlfriend by finding her escaped racehorse in an epic expedition. My favorite horsey series though was Jinny (I think that’s what the series was called). It was very British and very eighties. She was an English girl with hippy parents who were doing some kind of back to nature thing. Her dad was a burned out probation officer and they moved from a city flat to some big crumbling country house. She got a half wild Arab that she named Shantih. It was so great. Lots of willful teenage girl gets damaged wild beast to trust her stuff, a bit of slightly supernatural creepy stuff. And Flambards! Orphans and country houses and scary uncles and horses and hunting and WW1. Perfect.
Such a Horse Girl, down to the detailed envisioning of the perfect palomino I would one day own. I never did learn to draw them though.
Anyway. A horse book with healthy children AND horses! Hold the Rein Free: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6372079-hold-…
Lucy Rees wrote two small perfect novels – Wild Pony and Horse of Air – before growing up to become a horse trainer herself. She and KM Peyton (Fly-By-Night, The Team) are the high points of pre-Jinny-at-Finmory English pony literature.
Jane Smiley is writing a childrens’ series, the Abby Lovitt series, that I like very much. Other good American writers are Jean Slaughter Doty (Summer Pony, Winter Pony) and Jessie Haas (Working Trot).
The most interesting of Elaine Mitchell’s non-Silver Brumby novels, for my money, is Light Horse to Damascus. It’s an interesting complement to Rosalind Belben’s wonderful Our Horses in Egypt.
There’s an emerging genre that might be called recovering Horse Girl literature: I’d rate Susannah Forrest’s If Wishes Were Horses and Jane Badgers Heroines on Horseback as my favourites of these.
I’m a Horse Girl that grew into a Horse Lady.
As a child, I read every single M. Henry book, owned multiple Breyer horses and spent summers at various horse camps around the B.C. lower mainland. I drew horses at every opportunity and made them an on again/off again theme when attending ECIAD as a mature student. Finally, at age 43, I made the leap and bought my very own horse and its been the very best and very worst decision I’ve ever made. Here’s to mucking out pens, breathing in horse sweat, whispering sweet nothings into large, hairy ears, hanging on when confronted with fire-breathing, horse-eating wild turkeys and washing carrot pieces with the rest of your dirty laundry.
I’m surprised “National Velvet” didn’t get any mentions from the other commenters. That book is the ultimate Horse Girl book as far as I’m concerned. It also has a strong feminist undercurrent, and another awesome Mother who encourages her daughter to push her boundaries. I never saw the movie version, I just can’t buy Taylor as the tomboyish Velvet for one moment. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/225774.Nationa…
Of course, I had a Horse Girl phase around 10-11. I read the Flicka trilogy so many times I wore the pages thin. My parents couldn’t afford regular riding lessons but I did go to horse summer camp. I was frustrated because I wanted to ride the real horses but I kept getting the ponies to ride, because at the time I was small and lightweight compared to other kids. I was never scared of horses and there’s a photo of the four year old me beaming on the back of a horse (not a pony). As I grew older I gave up horse riding because I came to realize the horses won’t preform properly for you unless you ride them regularly, which I could never afford, so I abandoned my dream. Horses also helped me find the hobby I did follow through – I was so obsessed with drawing them my grandfather told me to copy Stubbs (he owned a book of his art) in order to achieve more realistic art. This led on to me becoming an Arty Girl in my teens. I still love drawing them to this day.
Flicka really isn’t about horses. Its about Ken choosing whether he’s his father’s or mother’s son. and considering this book dates from 1950’s talking about a boy with a feminine side is very progressive, in my opinion. It was also the first book I read as a kid that made me realize that Parents Are People Too. So many YA books hide the parents or they only appear in the margins. This was the first book I read that gave voice to the inner life of parents, that implied that they have conflicting feeling about their kids or that they don’t always know how to express those feelings. That was a valuable lesson.
You should watch the movie. Although The Pie is not piebald in the movie, so his name makes somewhat less sense, there is lots of horse eye-candy to make up for it. I watched the movie to death as a small child (pre-K into elementary school). I think my parents gave it to me knowing that I wouldn’t understand anything but the galloping anyway. Saw it recently as an adult and realized there are a lot of undercurrents in the movie that you just don’t follow as a kid. Go see it!
My new excuse for everything will be because I have a strain of loco blood from my mother.
I was a horse girl. Yep. Read every single book involving horses. There was one I obtained via the Scholastic book club called “Tall and Proud” about a girl recovering from polio and a racehorse recovering from an injured leg. The riding montage was triumphant!
Scholastic book clubs in the 70s was one of a Horse Girl’s best friends.
I didn't! I can't believe I missed the chance to be a Half-Dog/Half-Wolf Girl! I'm going to have to go creep around in the Young Adult section of the library yet again…
Horse Girl. Animal Girl. My mom and stepfather had horses, and my half-sister got a pony for Christmas, and I DIED of jealousy. The Sweet Running Filly series, Blue Sword series, and Black Stallion series were my mainstays, but I was flexible.
I was fortunate in that, whenever I stayed with my Grandma Fay, she would take me horseback riding at a (not all that) local hack stable at least once, if not multiple times. I rode a pony named Thunder and loved every moment. Some day I will be able to afford riding lessons at a place that has a horse strong enough to carry my fat self.
Surprised no one has mentioned C.W. Anderson who wrote and illustrated many books about jumpers, hunters and racers…Afraid to Ride was a stand out. And Patsey Gray. Of course the Black Stallion books and Marguerite Henry. And two I loved and though I read til dogeared, can’t remember the authors: Born to Race, about Whickery, a filly who is pointed towards the Kentucky Derby, and Scarlet Royal, a “touchy” horse in love with and loved by Margo a high schooler whose Mom has to turn their small farm into a riding school for financial reasons. Definitely a Horse girl and dog girl too!