Which pony books make you cry?

I can cry at pretty much anything (I was never good, but became far, far worse once I had the children.) My family are now very used to my welling up at emotional moments in films, and they all turn round expectantly at particularly mushy moments, whilst I gulp and try (and usually fail) to give them the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Again. When I read Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, I so sympathised with Linda, who is endlessly made to cry by being taunted about the match by her tougher siblings:
- 'A little, houseless match, it has no roof, no thatch,
It lies alone, it makes no moan, that little, houseless match.'
My absolute prime weepy moment isn't actually a pony book at all: it's E Nesbitt's The Railway Children. Even typing it is enough. It's the "Daddy, my Daddy," bit at the end.

But pony books do their bit too to add to the dampness. I have great difficulty reading Black Beauty when he meets Ginger again, and then the cart with Ginger's body in it goes past: "The head hung out of the cart tail..." - I shall spare you the rest of the quotation.

John Steinbeck's The Red Pony I am completely incapable of reading in a single sitting.

Pamela MacGregor Morris's Lucky Purchase has me in floods, as does Veronica Westlake's Ten Pound Pony: "They stood and stared at each other for a long time. We stared too, and I think our mouths must have been open. It seemed as if something had broken somewhere and time was standing still..."

Comments

Unknown said…
What a lovely cover; sadly my copy of 'The Ten Pound Pony' doesn't have one.

I don't weep, but I do get a bit choked up at the end of that story, and also at the end of 'The Railway Children'. 'Lucky Purchse' didn't affect me as much, although I did like it.

Now I'm trying the remember the book which featured a character, possibly a younger sibling, who liked to have the sad bits from 'Black Beauty' read to them, and would cry happily about Ginger's fate.
I cry buckets at Black Beauty (and the film with Sean bea, god, I'm sniffing all the way through - and the film of International Velvet)>

The second and third books in The Eventer's Triology - Genesis doing the cross country, and in the final book at the very end...
Jane Badger said…
Gillian - that book you're wondering about does ring bells, but not enough of them to come up with a name, I'm afraid.

M&M - I cried too at International Velvet, and had forgotten about Genesis. That's another one. Have just finished Harry Potter 7 and cried at that too.
mokey said…
"The Marvellous Mongolian" by James Aldridge - a beautiful transcontinental saga about how a Przewalski's stallion shipped to a reserve in England makes its way back to Mongolia, taking with him a little Shetland mare. It't told in the form of letters from the reserve owners grandaughter and a Mongolian boy. I bawled as a child and recently after purchasing the book again, I cried buckets and buckets!
Juxtabook said…
I cry over that Daddy bit in The Railway Children too! I remember crying over a pony book as a child. It was a library one and not one of my own and so I am not 100% what it was, but I think it was called something like Rosina Copper.

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