The Secret Horses of Briar Hill by Megan Shepherd
My rating: 4/5 cats
i definitely enjoyed reading this book, but like Rooftoppers, i have a feeling it would have been something i enjoyed even more if i had read it when i was a little girl, one of those books you read during those soft, impressionable whitebread years, which stick to your soul and become a part of who you are. i have a lot of those books, the most important of which was Island of the Blue Dolphins, and while this is nothing like that in theme or tone, it gives me the same impression of having that power to stick in the heart long into adulthood.
in many ways, this feels like a classic children’s book. i’ve never read The Secret Garden, but i know its basic premise, and there’s some overlap here – sickly orphanish child, secret ahem garden, and magical experiences both complicating the real world and making it more bearable. the writing is simple, restrained, and lulling, while still being terrifically haunting. but it’s also very modern in some ways, in that it isn’t didactic like so many children’s books of yore, and it is very ambiguous in both its treatment of the fantasy elements and its ending.
This is my secret: there are winged horses that live in the mirrors of Briar Hill hospital.
emmaline lives in a children’s hospital run by nuns, afflicted with the “stillwaters,” where the days blur colorlessly into each other; turnips and tea, lessons and doctors, and she spends most of her time with her bedridden best friend anna, daydreaming and drawing the white winged horses only she can see in the hospital’s mirrors.
she has little excitement in her life until the day she rebelliously scales the garden wall and discovers that one of the winged horses has crossed over from the mirror world, unable to return because of an injured wing. emmaline later discovers a letter from ‘the horse lord,’ instructing her to protect this horse, called foxfire, from the adversarial black horse who is in pursuit. and an adventure is born.
the book is a perfect blend of real and fantasy elements, and for all the threatening power of the black horse, much of the book’s action is grounded in the real world, where the slights and challenges emmaline faces during her daily life are small: other patients stealing her chocolate, wanting colored pencils of her own, railing against the restrictions imposed on her by her doctor. and it’s all so delicately handled because these petty grievances are just distractions from the much bleaker big picture – that these are characters quarantined in a children’s home for tb patients during WWII. so not only are they terribly sick, but there’s a lot going on in the outside world that impacts their lives and has already taken so much from them. these children suffer privations and limitations both because of their health and because of the war, causing them to fetishize the little they have, like colored pencils and comic books, and leave emmaline desperate for distraction and the possibility of a magical adventure, despite the real risks to her health.
war, illness, an uncertain future – all of this is constantly present, running underneath the squabbles and jealousies, but it’s not in your face. and i think that’s what gives it the sense of lasting appeal – as an adult, you can’t get the fact that there’s a war on out of your mind, which gives it a different resonance than reading it as a child would, where you’re allowed to focus on the immediate details of the story and forget the background details, as horrifying as they are.
in any case, it’s a beautiful story, beautifully illustrated, and even though i’m congenitally unable to experience the cries over a book, i’m sure many of you will find this pleasantly weepy.
ride true, my friends…
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this cover is killing me.
