It’s no coincidence that there are horses on the walls of caves in Lascaux, atop St. Mark’s in Venice, under the derriere of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, and alongside the Terracotta Army in China. Since they were first domesticated more than three thousand years ago, horses have been our transport, farming equipment, war machines, source of meat and milk, and a fine reason to bet your paycheck. While in reality they are partially-colorblind herbivores with fragile digestive systems and anxiety disorders, horses, nevertheless, have come to symbolize freedom, speed, courage, and beauty.
The pony’s contribution to history, on the other hand, is sorely overlooked. A subset of horses measuring 58 inches or less, ponies are mostly famous for biting children and/or launching them into the dust. There isn’t a single epic poem that honors a pony! Shakespeare natters on about trading kingdoms for horses, but there’s nary a pony mentioned in any of his plays. We honor explorer Ernest Shackleton, but not the pony he ate to survive.
My new book, Pony Confidential, aims to right this literary wrong. The first ever novel for adults narrated by a pony (not kidding), it’s a retelling of The Odyssey (also not kidding) starring an old pony who is searching for the one little girl he really loved, twenty-five years after he last saw her so he can tell her off for having got rid of him. (Ponies, you realize, are sold and sold and sold when we outgrow them.) Grumpy, opinionated, and bent on revenge, this self-described “furry fury” discovers that Penny, his long-lost owner, is now an adult accused of a murder he knows she didn’t commit. Though he’s arthritic and lacks opposable thumbs, he sets out to save her. Yes, it’s meant to make you laugh out loud, but there are also serious undertones about how we treat animals and each other.
Since I can’t give you a list of pony books for adults, here is instead a list of horse books for adults. These books have stuck with me over the years because of standout moments that conjure images so clear in my mind that I feel they happened to me. For each of these wonderful stories I’ve noted what that seared-into-the brain detail is. And to my own hero I can only say, “Sorry, Pony, to once again laud famous horses—maybe one day you will be just one of a long list of ‘Pony Books for Adults.’”
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Though now we think of Black Beauty as a children’s book, it was written in 1877 for adults. Author Anna Sewell was horrified by the treatment of horses (the main mode of transportation in her era), and her novel—told in the first person from a horse’s point of view– was an attempt to make people recognize that the animals they were beating, working to death, and starving had feelings. Black Beauty was so successful that it led to the creation of animal protection organizations and laws against animal cruelty in many countries. Of course, what makes its potentially cloying anthropomorphism effective is that it’s a well-told tale. Beauty is born to a kind master in the countryside where he has all the things horses need to thrive, but through the vagaries of fate endures a series of deeply unfortunate events. The searing detail for me is the death of a main animal character, an event which broke my heart as a child but also inspired a very funny spoiler alert line delivered by a goat in Pony Confidential. Beauty’s kindness despite his pain, fear and powerlessness still resonate today and have kept it the urtext for horse girls.
Horse Crazy by Sarah Maslin Nir
This series of essays by a prizewinning New York Times journalist interrogates why we (and she) are so obsessed with horses. She examines our culture’s love of equines from every angle, including her own upbringing in New York City and how riding was an escape from trauma, but also an invitation to a rarified world that as an outsider she couldn’t quite gain entry to. The searing detail here is a moment during a competition when her horse falls and rolls over her—I can see the scene in slow motion horror as if I were ringside. Maslin Nir uses her journalistic eye for detail to explore far flung corners of the horse world and in doing so reveals surprising things about power, privilege and passion.
In Deep by Maxine Kumin
Pulitzer Prize winner Maxine Kumin was the U.S. Poet Laureate in the early 1980s, and these essays are a gorgeously written, lyric chronicle of her life on a New Hampshire farm raising kids and horses as she writes and teaches. Kumin is deeply in love with the landscape and all the creatures in it, but also honest about the challenges of country living—black flies, squatter raccoons, unruly young horses, and jicama that doesn’t grow where it’s supposed to. The killer detail for me is picturing her spreading the pages of the New York Times Book Review to mulch zucchini and tomato seedlings in her garden. Take that, Gray Lady! I blame Kumin’s seductively beautiful prose for the moneypit ranchette I now own.
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
This 2022 novel by the brilliant Australian-born journalist-turned-novelist Geraldine Brooks is a triple narrative of an enslaved young man working as a jockey in the antebellum South and Lexington, the horse he forms a relationship with; a 1950s art dealer interested in a painting of that horse; and a 21st century researcher at the Smithsonian who crosses paths with both the horse’s skeleton and an art historian researching the painting. Brooks masterfully weaves the stories to create tension and suspense. The memorable moment for me is the jockey’s flight from danger through a warzone on Lexington’s back –I was on the edge of my seat for every hoofbeat. Based on the real Lexington, Horse is a nod to the many African-Americans whose foundational contributions to the sport of horse racing in this country are only now being acknowledged and celebrated after centuries of erasure.
Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley is one of those rare writers who can make you laugh out loud on one page and weep on the next. A sprawling novel set in the world of Thoroughbred racing and told from many different points of view, including a Jack Russell terrier named Eileen and several racehorses, Horse Heaven chronicles lives that are familiar but utterly poignant—down on their luck gamblers, too-tall jockeys, insatiable rich people, all desperate for a win. My favorite character is Justa Bob, a downwardly mobile Thoroughbred who passes from owner to owner without losing his optimism (a certain pony would have bitten all of the humans who let Bob down). Smiley’s prose is eagle-eyed but also laced with kindness, making Horse Heaven a world that keeps pulling you back in even as it breaks your heart.
The Eighty Dollar Champion by Elizabeth Letts
One of our best horse historians, Elizabeth Letts here tells the heartwarming true story of Snowman, a skeletal nag rescued from a slaughter truck in Pennsylvania by Harry de Leyer, a recent immigrant from Holland and WWII survivor struggling to support his growing family in his not-so-welcoming new country. The bag of bones turns out to be a phenomenal natural jumper who blossoms into a champion and holds the de Leyer family together through difficult times. The searing moment here is when Harry is delayed by a snowstorm and a flat tire and misses the auction, arriving in time to see a white nose sticking out of the slats of a truck headed to the slaughterhouse. I’m not crying, you are.
Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer
This is the kind of adventure story that nails you to the couch until you have read to the last page. To say that this is a memoir of Lara Prior-Palmer’s victory in the world’s most grueling horse race is like saying H is For Hawk is about a bird. Prior-Palmer is nineteen, unmoored, and not an especially experienced rider when she decides to enter the Mongol Derby, a 600-mile chase through one of the most remote areas of the world. The ten days she spends trying (and often failing) to stay atop a revolving set of untrained mounts is not a pretty travelogue about the beautiful steppe and the picturesque nomadic inhabitants, but instead an existential descent into what it means to be a young woman in the world. Killer moments abound, but Prior-Palmer’s intense rivalry with the other leading woman in the race, a hyper-competitive American rider named Devan, make me laugh—and cringe– to this day.
The Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson
Horses have always been humans’ unacknowledged therapists—it was Winston Churchill who said that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. We’re back in Mongolia with this memoir of a father’s attempt to communicate with his profoundly autistic son Rowan through horses. Isaacson and his wife are living in Texas and at the end of their rope when he decides (yes, marital tension ensues) to take Rowan to shamans in remote Mongolia to see if they can break his son free of the barriers to communication that he sees as imprisoning Rowan and destroying the family’s lives. What follows is both a wild adventure saga, a heartwarming love story, and a fascinating exploration of the fuzzy boundary of faith and science. This book inspired Penny’s relationship with her daughter in Pony Confidential. The moment when Isaacson is thousands of miles from home, sitting in a tepee with drumming reindeer-herding people and their chanting shaman, desperately hoping they can help his son, is definitely hot-grill searing.