Alyssa Brugman
The ShelbySeries
For Sale or Swap, 2004
Beginner’s Luck, 2005
Hot Potato, 2006
Hide & Seek, 2007
Greener Pastures, 2008
For Sale or Swap
Random House Australia
Rating: «««««
Alyssa Brugman captures the stresses and strains of being a teenager keeping a pony on a shoestring brilliantly. The book (part of what is now a series of five) opens with Shelby being given the Most Improved award, which "meant you used to suck but now you're slightly better." She won't even get this unless she pays her Pony Club dues, but she knows how difficult things are for her parents ("she didn't want to ask her mother and see that strained, despairing look that she always got when Shelby asked for money") and so she doesn't ask. Shelby's pony, Blue, is not a thing of beauty. She keeps him on unused land near to her home, and struggles to maintain him. Her riding, she decides, would improve if only she had a better pony, and so she swaps Blue for the beautiful chestnut Maxshine Celtic Copper. The new pony however is not chestnut: the chestnut washes off. She is grey, and she is stolen. She is part of a scam. By then it is far too late to get Blue back and Shelby is left with no pony at all.
I liked the way the plot then twisted and turned without going exactly where you'd expect. I liked the changing relationships between Shelby and her friends Erin and Hayley, and I liked the way Shelby reacts to the world around her: and it is a world in which adults are a normal part. In many children's books, adults are not present at all, or else one dimensional figures floating around on the periphery of the children's adventures. Real life is not like that. Real life has the mother who is in charge of the ponies, not the daughter; the instructor who gets things wrong; the unsympathetic policeman. What I like about this book is the way it takes a framework that is utterly realistic, and works within it. No one appears to anyone in a dream; no pony turns into a unicorn. It's a normal world, and it's observed so well.
Yes, it’s very obviously Australian, but we can cope with Neigbours et al, so why
on earth do the publishers apparently think these books are too Aussie for us? Just
let us have it, Random House. We need these books.
Alyssa Brugman is a prize winning children’s author based in Australia. She has an ever increasing number of horses and ponies (seven at last count). Over the last few months I’ve read a lot of modern fiction, and Alyssa’s Shelby series is right up there at the top. The books are not easy to get hold of in the UK: you can try Amazon, but you will probably do better with Ebay and Book Closeouts.
They are worth the effort. I have a bookshelf on which mymodern working stock lives, and in a fire, these are some of the ones I’d grab. Alyssa takes many standard pony book conventions and subverts them. She also addresses contemporary issues: barefoot is in there!