The Ghostly Blinkers

Babette Cole's The Ghostly Blinkers is a pony-school adventure for 8 year olds where the school ghosts ride side-saddle and love a race.

What happens

It's January and Fetlocks Hall is freezing. The headmistress, Potty Smythe, has stopped buying heating oil so the ponies can keep their luxuries. They're snug in three rugs each while the humans shiver!

Then a nasty brown envelope lands on the mat. The builders who mended the ballroom roof want a hundred thousand pounds. If the money can't be found, the school will close and the ponies will be sold.

Penny Simms is back for the new term, and she has a secret. She's a Unicorn Princess. She can talk to ponies in their own language, and her little skewbald Patch can fly (invisibly, which is very handy).

Penny can see the Fitznicely family too. They're the school ghosts, who live in their portraits and ride out in velvet habits. The twins are super cheeky. One of them unscrews her own head and tucks it under her arm, which Penny thinks is disgusting!

A plan starts to form around Ben the stable lad's old racehorse, Scudeasy. He could win the Grand National, but for some reason he just won't race any more. And who better to find out why than a girl who speaks Equalese?

Reading it is like being dropped into a very busy, very horsey world. There's a team chase over twenty-eight fences, a runaway pony galloping towards a quarry, and a grand ball where the ghost children get up to brilliant mischief (a whole roll of loo paper is involved). It's packed with proper pony talk too, from plaiting up to cross-country, so a horse-mad reader will feel right at home.

A few of the grown-up jokes haven't aged well, which is worth knowing. One lady at the ball gets called fat and blubbery, and a new boy's family is summed up by their money and their oil wells. They're passing lines, but you might want to chat about them.

What to read next

Penny has clearly had one big adventure at Fetlocks already, and the story mentions it as it goes. If they'd like to go back to where it all started, The Unicorn Princess is where pony-mad Penny first spots an advert for a very unusual school.