My Little Pony – The Junior Novel

My Little Pony - The Junior Novel by G. M. Berrow is a magical adventure for 9 year olds that takes the ponies a very long way from home.

What happens

It's the first ever Festival of Friendship in Canterlot, and Princess Twilight Sparkle has a whiteboard, a checklist and several friendship equations. She has also asked the other three princesses to shift the sun and the moon a few degrees to improve the stage lighting. They say no. Kindly.

Then the sky goes dark, and it isn't weather.

An airship crushes the spires of the city on its way down. Out steps Tempest Shadow, in black armour, with a scar across one eye and a horn snapped into shards, and what she wants is the princesses' magic. Twilight is the only one who gets away.

So six friends and a young dragon called Spike end up in a cave below the city with no plan, no princesses and a kingdom under occupation. What follows is a proper quest, south beyond the Badlands, hunting for a queen whose name Celestia never got to finish saying.

The fun of it is the six of them being utterly themselves under pressure. Rarity ties three bows in the time it takes Rainbow Dash to decorate an entire stage badly. Pinkie Pie fires a cake out of a confetti cannon and hits a princess with it. Applejack hands out cider and keeps everybody sensible. Spike carries the scrolls and falls off the whiteboard.

If your reader knows the film, this is the film in book form and it reads like one. If they don't, everything gets explained as it goes along.

A caution about that opening, because it's sharper than the cover would suggest. Three princesses are struck with green orbs and turned to stone one after another, and one of them is frozen with her face fixed in an expression of horror. The friends then go through a collapsing bridge and over a waterfall. It's over quickly and the tone stays bright, but a younger or more anxious child may find that stretch genuinely frightening.

The other thing worth saying is that Tempest is interesting. Nobody explains her broken horn, and Twilight notices it and wonders what happened to her rather than simply being scared of her.

What to read next

If a magical world gone wrong is the draw, try The Unicorn Quest. Claire finds a ladder inside a fireplace, climbs it with her sister and comes out in an overgrown garden in a country where everything feels subtly off.