Review: Lynda Kelly - The Most Horrible Pony

-

Amy’s dearest dream is to have a pony, but then her Great Aunt Myrtle buys her one. Clown, as the title, The Most Horrible Pony, suggests, has some horrible habits. He’s a demon to catch; he bites and bucks. There’s more for Amy to contend with though. One day, out on a ride with Clown, who isn’t totally unreliable, Amy finds a Thoroughbred filly in a deserted cottage. The mysterious Dagmar appears too. Amy finds out a famous filly has gone missing, and works out that the filly in the cottage is of course the missing Eastern Eclipse. There’s a reward for her return, but the huge blowfly in the ointment is Dagmar, who wriggles and squirms her way out of informing the police herself, and endlessly manipulates Amy (and later her friends) into not doing anything about it either. Amy finds this hornswogglingly irritating, and so did I. That’s good, in that I identified with the character, but Dagmar’s intransigence is so unrelenting and pigheaded (and this is quite a long book, so there’s an awful lot of Dagmar and her bolshiness) that in the end I lost all sympathy with her and no longer cared about the reasons why she wouldn’t do the right thing.



The book does take a long time to get where it’s going. The plot is pretty conventional; girl, pony, gymkhana and missing racehorse, and there were periods when I wondered when it was going to get moving again. Fortunately the author does a pretty good job, on the whole, with her characters. Amy is an energetic creation, and there’s a lot to like in her. Lynda Kelly has written a brilliant younger brother in Liam, one of the best I’ve read in a long while. Liam has a procession of imaginary creatures, which provide a comic highlight in the book, and the relationship between him and Amy is realistically snippy. The children are the most successful characters: Mum is something of a shadow; Dad rather less so, and Great Aunt Myrtle rather too exaggerated for comic effect.

That said, the author does a good job with Clown. She writes a good horse; or at least a pony: the mysterious filly never really emerges from the shadows. Clown, however, does. The writer also does a gripping gymkhana. Clown turns out to have a talent for gymkhana games, and the gymkhana is one of the highlights of the book. Gymkhanas aren’t necessarily easy to write: they can easily turn into yawn-a-minute litanies of who won what. Lynda Kelly creates real interest in hers, and it’s interesting seeing Amy realise in a thoroughly realistic and unmoralistic manner, that winning isn’t everything.

There are a couple of horsy bits I struggled with a little: Clown gives Amy some hefty bites while she’s grooming him. I can see that she might not have known to do it herself, but it might have been an idea for some other character to suggest tying him up as a solution. Then after Amy’s spent hours trying to catch Clown she dumps him into his stable, fully tacked up, and leaves him there.  That might well be a failure of editing: with the way Amy’s portrayed in the book, I’m sure she would relent and go and sort him out, but she didn’t, and that did make me start to get judgemental and twirl my pearls.

If you’re after a straightforward pony adventure with some decent characters, don’t be put off by the clunky titles, as these books should fit the bill. There’s four more in the series (one’s planned for later this year).

~ 0 ~
Lynda Kelly – The Most Horrible Pony (Amy and Clown 1)
Kelly Publications, 2012, £4.50
Ebook,  in Kindle only

Lynda Kelly’s page on my website

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rollkur and the blue tongue

-
I've been meaning to write about this all week, but reading the exclusive in Horse and Hound about the controversy tipped me over the edge. For my non-horsy readers, rollkur is a training/warming up technique used by some dressage riders. It basically involves riding the horse with its jaw pulled in virtually to its chest, in order to increase suppleness. Patrik Kittel , a Swedish competitor in Odense was videoed riding his horse in this way. If you watch the video , you'll see the horse's tongue hanging out - blue. It takes a while before the rider notices this. When he does, he stops, puts the horse's tongue back in, and carries on. There are two things which bother me about this. Firstly, I am fully aware large sections of the dressage world, and some of its brighest stars, consider rollkur perfectly ok, but the FEI guidelines state this practice should only be for short periods, allowing the horse to rest. Patrick Kittel apparently rode the horse for two hou...
Read more

Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

-
Image
My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes...
Read more

Dick Sparrow - 40 Horse Hitch, and Neil Dimmock's 46 Percherons

-
Image
Here's a clip of Dick Sparrow driving 40 horses. It's an amazing sight, particularly when the shot changes to show the team from the rear and you get the great incongruity of modern American corporate architecture as a background to the wagon and horses. I love the anticipation in the video: the sense of something amazing being just round the corner is palpable. Thanks to Christina Wilsdon for telling me about this world record 46 Percheron hitch (alas just stills) but you get the idea.
Read more