Saddle Club 6 – Nightmare

Bonnie Bryant's Saddle Club 6 - Nightmare is a stables story for 9 year olds about a girl whose father goes away and cannot tell her where.

Carole Hanson gets off the bus grinning so hard that strangers notice. She's had the sort of afternoon that doesn't come twice. Max called her a distinguished young rider. Then the vet let her help, and told her the restlessness she'd spotted in an old gelding was colic, and that she'd probably saved his life.

She's still deciding which piece of news to tell her dad first when she gets home and sees the suitcase in the hall.

He's a colonel. The operation is classified. He can't say where he's going or how long for, and the only way to reach him is a message through his office, in an emergency.

That's a lot to hand a child, and the book knows it. Carole tries to look fine so he won't worry, while working out that he's trying to look fine so she won't. Neither of them is fooled. She waits until his car is out of sight before she cries.

So she moves in with Lisa for the duration, which is how the story gets going.

What's nice here is that the horse knowledge is real. Colic is described properly, through what Carole sees rather than what she's told. Stamping. Swishing. Reaching round for his own flank with his nose. Any pony-mad reader will feel clever for the rest of the day.

The three girls are drawn quickly and clearly. Carole is the horse-craziest and forgets everything else. Lisa is organised to the point of comedy and reads all twenty books on the summer list. Stevie knows the way to the principal's office extremely well.

Worth knowing about two things before you start. Carole's mother died of cancer a few years before the book opens. It's set out plainly in the first chapter and she thinks about it more than once, so it's backstory rather than something that happens to her here.

The other is that the trouble the title points at is a deadly horse illness at a neighbouring stable, and a long wait to find out whether it reaches this one. Worth a word with your reader if they've got a pony they love.

If they'd rather meet these three at the start, A Summer Without Horses opens with Stevie sliding down a tree in front of her brothers and the whole club making a pact that could land them with Veronica.