Book Review: Too Many Ponies

 Title: Too Many Ponies (Pony Pals #6)

Author: Jeanne Betancourt

Date: 1995

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-590-25245-3

Length: 86 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Paul Bachem

Quote: "Too many apples will make you sick."

Somehow I'm reading that as an oblique reference to Scholastic's "Little Apple" trademark for very very short, simple, bland books, the kind that would have appealed to me when I was four or five years old, about characters who are obviously closer to twelve years old. Adults can enjoy even infant-type picture books where the pictures are printed on fabric and bound together with cords, but too many of them, as when that's all the school's "book club" offers for an entire middle school grade...

Anyway: Pam, who has been riding ponies for five years, is blessed. She loves ponies, her mother is a riding instructor, and Pam gets to train new ponies before other children can pay to spend time with them. It's a grown-up-sized responsibility, for someone whose story can be told on what I hope is still considered a second grade reading level, and it brings a grown-up-sized problem. People become jealous of Pam. Her friends resent that she doesn't have time for longer trail rides with them on "her" pony, and "her" pony resents that she's bringing out three apples and giving two to those other two ponies.

There's an obvious answer, but complications set in when the children aren't sure how to interpret Pam's main ride's behavior. Why won't the pony let children come into her stall? Is she all that jealous, even when she's the center of attention...or could there be some other reason? Could it have anything to do with the pregnant stray cat Pam's family have adopted? Can the way others treat us really NOT be all about us? Can people, even when they're looking at wonderful us, actually have other things on their minds? Yes! 

If a middle school student liked the pony stories and pictures enough not to mind that the story is made accessible to kindergarteners, it might be a good writing prompt: "Write about a time when someone seemed impatient or unfriendly to you, and you waited patiently and learned what was really on that person's mind."

If it's helped even one child not to grow up like the whiny young retail employees who think shoppers' stressed-out, hung-over, financially distressed moods are all about them and the shoppers are responsible for making their jobs fun, this book would be worth much more than $5.