It’s Reading Ireland Month 2020, hosted over on Cathy / 746Books’ blog (see the main post here) and I was very pleased to find that I could fulfil this challenge from my TBR, as that’s how I’m doing challenges this year. Gill gave me this book from my wishlist for Christmas 2018 (so it gets an older book off the TBR, too – hooray) and as well as the author being from Northern Ireland, it’s set there, too.

I have got another NetGalley win to report as well as my incomings but I want to leave this post just belonging to Read Ireland Month, so you’ll have to wait until Monday for that one …

Sheena Wilkinson – “Too Many Ponies”

(25 December 2018 – from Gill)

A really well-done pony book by an esteemed Irish YA writer, in fact the sequel to two books about people in the older generation in this one, but I believe her first foray into books for a slightly younger age group.

Winner of the Children’s Book Ireland Award, it tells the story of Lucy – who certainly doesn’t always get it right, although has good intentions – who has started senior school and got in with some mean girls who have shiny co-ordinated ponies who are liveried at a fancy yard and have matching accessories (what?). When there’s an opportunity for Lucy to help win some money to shore up the rocky finances of Rosevale, her friend Aidan’s family’s sanctuary for rescue horses and donkeys, where her own pony Puzzle boards, she leaps at it, but Aidan, already being bullied by the equivalent posh boys at the same school, suffers collateral damage from her relentless campaigning.

Aiden is a great character, conflicted about being a ‘pony boy’ but committed to and brilliant with the rescues; his fear of his dad’s disapproval but real fear of jumping and cross-country riding is portrayed well and convincingly. I liked the parts from his point of view or with him central, and am glad of another pony boy to join Victoria Eveleigh’s Joe.

Yes, there are slightly too-good-to-be-true plot twists along the way, but this IS a pony book and such things are part of the genre. The most satisfying scenes are one of Aidan’s when he has a triumph and the one where Erin, the pony friend Lucy should have made, stands up to her and the mean girls.  An assured and technically good story from a great story-teller, and I’m glad it got promoted a bit up the TBR to be read now.

Have you been doing Reading Ireland Month (I know Ali has!)? Any good recommendations? I am pretty sure this was the only Irish book on my TBR …