Rating: WARTY!
This debut novel is now forty years old, so it has to be read in that context with an eye on whether modern readers of the middle-grade age group would appreciate it. That said, it's actually quite timeless in general terms, so you can read it and imagine it's happening today, if you ignore that the girls communicate via hand-written letters rather than through email, and have no ubiquitous cell phones/p>
It's set in Britain and features Mary, who is friends with Anna, a relatively well-off farmer's daughter who is attending boarding school in the hope of pursuing her show-jumping dreams. While Anna is off with her hoity-toity friends, becoming, in Mary's eyes, a different person, Mary is left behind to take care of Anna's horse, named September.
The author writes in very simplistic, overly dramatic, black and white terms, and anthropomorphizes the titular horse shamelessly. I know horses are smart, and any intelligent animal can sense moods and emotions in others - not through any telepathy or human-like quality, but through simple observation of how we hold and carry ourselves, and probably through facial expressions, too. The problem is that the author almost turns this horse into a four-legged human in its purported prescience, and it gets worse as the story progresses.
At boarding school, Anna encounters another horse, named King of Prussia, and she starts riding it exclusively, and winning several competitions with it - and evidently drawing away from Mary into a world of new and rich friends. After Anna returns home for the summer holidays and her over-bearing and domineering father demands that she jump September over a particularly hard jump, the horse becomes injured on the dreaded Demon's Dyke fence. Suddenly it's a question of whether he's worth saving or whether the knacker's yard can make better use of him - a question that seems to be answered when Anna's parents decide to sell their luxury car to buy King of Prussia for their daughter.
This deadeningly predictable story continued downhill from there with an ridiculously absurd everyone wins ending which just about made me puke, it was so very perfect. A very young, very un-discriminating child may enjoy this, but in 2015, I think it's below most middle grade readers' credibility level.
