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Jill's Gymkhana (The Jill Books by Ruby Ferguson Book 1)

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Jill's Gymkhana, A Stable for Jill, Jill has two ponies (later republished as Jill and the Runaway), Jill enjoys her Ponies, Jill's Riding Club, Rosettes for Jill, Jill and the Perfect Pony, Pony Jobs for Jill (later republished as Challenges for Jill) and Jill's Pony Trek. The books follow the exploits of pony mad but broke Jill Crewe, her long suffering mother and her friends from age 11 right throughout their teenage years, from the sudden bit of good fortune that enabled her to purchase her first pony, through the trials, tribulations and sheer humiliation of learning to ride to running their own riding school and other exploits. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Looking at the changes that were made, it’s interesting to see that Jill was allowed to wear make up in the 1940s, but not in the 1960s, a supposedly freer time for children. Reference to the reckless melting of the whole week’s cheese ration has been changed to simply ‘Mummy melted down some cheese’.

It even sells itself by talking about how Jill is a total beginner who makes loads of mistakes with her pony, so I should be able to pick it all up as I go, right? The series takes the protagonist from the age of twelve to fifteen, from a pony novice to a prize-winning rider.Written in 1949, the book shows its age in the usual way of vintage children's books: the sheer amount of freedom that the children are routinely allowed and, contrastingly, how terrifyingly strict Jill's mother is in some respects.

In the first book in the series, Jill's Gymkhana, Jill's father has recently died, and she moves with her mother to a small Pool Cottage near the fictional village of Chatton.Seven paragraphs (37 lines) detailing Ann’s bulgy saddlebags and the hiding of the vests under a hedge have been deleted. There is a sort of training montage about Jill learning to ride her pony, and at the end there is a weird timeskip which seems to point to the book being partially based on life experience, as all sorts of previously unmentioned characters show up in the final gymkhana where Jill wins a bunch of ribbons (but not, we note, in her first gymkhana, which would be the obvious if implausible narrative solution). This list isn’t necessarily definitive; we’ve tried to be as careful as possible, but can make no guarantee about accuracy or completeness.

These books are extremely well written, amusing and sometimes slightly tongue in cheek, especially when a terribly grown up 12 year old Jill refers to someone as "being in her 40's but not too old to enjoy herself"! The protagonist is enjoyable, and like all good pony books, she faces interesting horse-y challenges along the way. Does starting the year with a 72 year old English book for older children and young teens seem weird? To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

a b c d e f Horrell, Georgina; Jaques, Zoe (14 September 2023), "Ferguson [née Ashby], Ruby Constance Annie (1899–1966), novelist and children's author", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, doi: 10. Written in 1949, read by me around 1972 and rediscovered thanks to Lucy Mangan’s wonderful Bookworm. The plot is that Jill wants a pony, because Jill is an 11-year-old girl, and Jill gets a pony, because Jill is an incredibly lucky 11-year-old girl.

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