Misty’s Twilight

Marguerite Henry's Misty's Twilight is a horse story for 8 year olds, built around a foal nobody can hold still.

What happens

It starts with a grown-up's dream, which is unusual. Dr Sandy Price read Misty of Chincoteague when she was twelve and has been planning this trip ever since. She now has a farm in Florida, two children and a horse trailer, and has decided the family will drive north in July to watch the wild ponies swim and buy one at the auction.

Pam and Chris are ten and seven. Neither of them wants to go. Pam is missing a birthday picnic with an all-chocolate cake. Chris's boa constrictor is about to have babies, possibly fifty.

You do not need to have read Misty of Chincoteague first. Sandy retells it to the children on the drive north, which is a tidy way of handing it to a reader who has never heard of her.

The swim itself is the showpiece. A hundred ponies driven into the sea by men who were fishermen yesterday and cowboys today, whooping and waving their caps. Twelve minutes of swimming across the channel, every pinto turned the same dark colour by the water, then drying out into circus colours again as they are herded up the main street. Forty thousand visitors. Children trying to see through a picket fence of grown-up legs.

Sandy comes home with four ponies instead of two, including a three week old colt she has to talk the entire auction into letting her buy, and a mare called Sunshine who is Misty's great-granddaughter.

Sunshine is bred to a thoroughbred stallion. Twilight is born at dusk. That is where the book finds out what it is actually about.

Twilight is fast and furious and impossible. She races the thoroughbreds along the fence line for fun. She skids into the corners on her haunches. She will barely tolerate a brush. Shut in a stall to wait for the farrier she rears and bucks herself into a lather and once bends a steel door with a parting kick. She teaches herself to jump things that are not there, while the children shout out the fences she is clearing.

Nobody can work out what she is for. That question is the engine of the whole thing.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The foals are penned away from their mothers overnight to wean them, and they cry, and Chris cries about it until his mother explains why the firefighters are not being cruel. There is a passing line about Misty herself being dead and stuffed in a museum, which lands oddly if your child has only just met her. A reader who loves animals will feel both of those.

What to read next

If it is Twilight who keeps them turning the pages, they will get on with The Racehorse Who Wouldn't Gallop, in which a girl accidentally buys a thoroughbred at auction and then discovers he refuses to run.