Babette Cole’s The Enchanted Pony is a magical boarding-school story for 8 year olds about a pony-mad girl who can talk to ponies and fly them over the treetops.<\/p>\n
Penny Simms is at Fetlocks Hall Pony School. On the surface it’s lessons, grooming kit and horse shows. Underneath it’s something else entirely. Penny has secret gifts from the King of the Unicorns, and only a handful of people at school know.<\/p>\n
The headmistress, Potty Smythe, wants a parents’ day to keep the mums and dads happy. Everyone’s excited to show off. Everyone except Pip. Pip’s parents vanished two years ago while working with zebras in Africa, and all this talk of parents sends her to the tack room in tears.<\/p>\n
Then Carlos’s pony spots something odd in Middlemarsh Wood. It’s a palomino pony with the top half of a girl! She’s a Centaureen, half horse and half human, and she’s crying because she thinks she’s ugly. Her name (the one human ears can cope with) is Sophie, and she wants to go to school more than anything.<\/p>\n
Penny starts teaching her in secret. Sophie’s alphabet is wonderful. A is for archery, not apple. K is for Kelpie, a shape-shifting water horse that can steal a child’s parents and freeze them in time. Which makes Penny think straight away of Pip…<\/p>\n
It’s bursting with invention. There are ghost twins who throw their own heads down the stairs to each other. The ponies all chat away to each other too (one calls her mum senile and gets a nip for it). It’s cosy and properly daft.<\/p>\n
Just so you know, the Kelpies are genuinely nasty. Sophie explains that they lure a child onto their sticky backs, then plunge under the water to drown and eat them. There’s also a passing mention that one girl’s parents were killed in a hunting accident. It’s all told quite lightly, but a worrier might want a grown-up nearby.<\/p>\n
It’s a later adventure in the Fetlocks Hall series, so Penny already has her powers when it starts. It still works on its own, because the first chapter fills you in on everything.<\/p>\n
If they’re after more ponies with a bit of magic about them, try The Sea Pony. Grace lives by a bay where magical sea ponies leap through the waves, and she wishes more than anything that she could talk to them. Penny would understand!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Babette Cole’s The Enchanted Pony is a magical boarding-school story for 8 year olds about a pony-mad girl who can talk to ponies and fly them over the treetops. Penny Simms is at Fetlocks Hall Pony School. On the surface it’s lessons, grooming kit and horse shows. Underneath it’s something else entirely. Penny has secret […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13124,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9380,"lr_next_read_anchor":"The Sea Pony","lr_seo_hook":"A weeping half-pony girl in the woods, and water horses that steal parents."},"book_tag":[1045],"age_group":[26],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[128],"class_list":["post-9014","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-adventure-books","age_group-books-for-8-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-babette-cole"],"yoast_title":"The Enchanted Pony by Babette Cole | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A weeping half-pony girl in the woods, and water horses that steal parents. For ages 8+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n