Saddle Club Super Edition 5 – Before They Rode Horses

Before They Rode Horses by Bonnie Bryant is a Saddle Club story for 9 year olds in which three horse-mad girls have to talk about something other than horses.

What happens

Max and Mrs Reg are away all day at a Pony Club meeting. The stable hand is at a graduation. That leaves Deborah, who is Max's wife, knows very little about horses and is a month off having a baby, in charge of Pine Hollow. Stevie, Carole and Lisa volunteer to help.

The stalls get mucked out. The saddles get soaped. Then Deborah's contractions start, fifteen minutes apart, and Max is still at his meeting.

What she wants, while they wait, is not Scrabble played with horse words and not another horse book read aloud at her. She wants a true story from each of them. Something that actually happened, with no horses in it whatsoever.

That's the book. Three girls, three stories from before any of them had ever sat on a pony, told in a farmhouse kitchen with somebody checking the clock.

Lisa goes first. Hers involves a school production of A Christmas Carol, a boy called Larry Titus who wrecked her audition on purpose, and a mother who responded to all of this by signing her up for charm school. Lisa arrives at her first lesson covered in grease from a petrol station toilet. It's very funny and slightly painful.

It's a clever shape for a series book. You get to know these three as children rather than as riders, and it explains an enormous amount about all of them.

One thing to flag. The book is of its time. There's a mother who decides her daughter has flopped as an actress and had better learn to be charming instead, and a passing remark about a boy seeing a psychiatrist after his parents' divorce that's handled with far less care than it would be now. Worth a word beforehand if your reader notices that sort of thing.

What to read next

The other thing is that this one sits fifth in the series and assumes you already know the girls. If your reader would rather meet them properly first, A Summer Without Horses has Stevie falling out of a tree and the other two giving up riding in sympathy, which goes about as well as you'd imagine.