Pony Confidential (Christina Lynch)

Pony Confidential
Christina Lynch
Berkley
Fiction, Humor/Mystery
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Few things are as magical as the bond between a little girl and her perfect pony. The thrill of learning to ride, the bliss of lazy afternoons on the trail, the pride of a ribbon at the big show... but little girls become bigger girls and grown women, and somewhere along the way the perfect pony gets left behind. But it never forgets that little girl - and some ponies never forgive.
Pony had a girl once, a girl named Penny who read him poetry and fed him carrots and promised they'd be together forever and always. Only she vanished without even saying goodbye, leaving him to a succession of owners, each worse than the last as he crisscrosses the country. It's been over two decades now, and only his determination to find her again and make her pay for her betrayal keeps him going. (Well, that, and the chance to inflict misery on the humans who pass him around like a bad coin.)
Penny, meanwhile, has grown up, married, and raised a child... but her life is anything but happy, with a possible divorce on the horizon and a teen daughter struggling with mental illness. In fact, she hasn't really been happy since she was a child in New York and took riding lessons at a local stable, where she talked her parents into buying a stubborn, cranky, wonderful pony the color of the sun - a pony she had to leave behind suddenly when a tragedy occurred. She thought that was all behind her, until the local sheriff turns up at her door with a warrant for her arrest.
By the time Pony catches up with Penny, the angry little animal may be her only chance at avoiding a lifetime in prison for a murder she did not commit. But what is one old pony supposed to do about it?

REVIEW: Though it was my sister who was the big horse nut in our household, I grew up with the requisite stable of Breyer figures and My Little Pony toys, not to mention innumerable playings of an off-brand audio story "The Little Brown Pony" (which was basically a watered-down knock-off of Black Beauty, but darned if the theme song doesn't still get randomly stuck in my head). So when I saw this title in an article on Best Books of 2024, it seemed like it could be fun. The cover bills Pony Confidential as a hard-boiled pony sleuth saving his grown-up girl by solving a mystery, down to the cover image (a Holmesian deerstalker cap hanging on a horseshoe), but the actual story isn't quite that at all. It's more The Incredible Journey than Sherlock Holmes, crossed with shades of an updated Black Beauty as it explores how humans use and abuse animals in general and horses in particular.
Splitting the narrative between Penny and Pony (weighted toward the latter), the book tells the inadvertently intertwined tales of woman and equine. As Penny, experiencing firsthand the crooked scales of justice, reflects on her unhappy life and the long-ago incident that culminated in her incarceration, Pony sets out on a quest to track down the girl who broke his heart while he still has enough stamina to do it; ponies only live thirty or forty years, and a good two-thirds of that span has already passed by. The journey is not a smooth one, especially when Pony's lingering resentment and tendency to act (usually in anger or sheer pony spite) first and think second trip him up at least as often as his nearly uncontrollable craving for carrots, and along the way he learns some lessons about life, love, and friendship. Some of his various encounters are humorous, while some are sobering, and the book mostly avoids venturing into preachy life lessons. For all the anger he's carried around for so long, an anger that's quite justified given how some of the people he meets treat him and others, deep down he's still nursing a broken heart and is surprised to learn that perhaps he hasn't entirely given up on humans (or at least one or two humans) after all. Penny, too, has to do some re-evaluating of her situation and choices, particularly how she's kept people at arm's length (which doesn't help when it comes time to find character witnesses for her defense), even as she realizes that she can't count on the law to save her and must try, with dim memories and limited resources, to figure out who the real culprit is from her jail cell.
There are some plot-convenient moments (and equally convenient plot delays), and some deliberate muddling of the concurrent timelines struck me as slightly manipulative (particularly how Lynch played coy about some events, stringing out reveals). Also, as implied, there were a few moments that felt a little like Chicken Soup for the Equine Soul sermons, but only a few. For the most part, though, it's the story of the timeless, magical bond between one girl and one very special, if very stubborn and cranky, pony.

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