Readers Up #5: Pretty Penny Farm
My sole criterion for this newsletter is both an inch wide and a fathom deep: for a book to be considered, it must feature the racetrack in some way. The Racetrack is generally useful metonymy for a huge variety of topics, of course. Thus, despite happening upon a promising bit of erotic urban romance which billed itself as the story of an escort service "masked as a high-class social club for women who love horse racing," ultimately I had to toss out The Saddle Club, as its text didn't even bother to capitalize on obvious riding-related innuendo. Thus, despite its precious deep-1980s illustrated cover and apparently CW-caliber plot summary, Pretty Penny Farm makes the cut. Starting off in suburban Connecticut, the plot quickly hangs a left straight into horseplayer territory.
"You going to start that business again about races being fixed, Dave?" Clammy asked.
"Lots of them are," [Dave] replied. "Besides, I think you're bucking odds, riding against pros. They're not going to let you country boys get anywhere near that finish line."
I don’t know if Pretty Penny Farm was a success at its publication in 1989, or if anyone in my immediate sphere has read it (if you have, holler!); all I know, in this instance, is materiality: the compact paperback, front cover ragged and back cover worn in specific modes, the way the middle finger’s knuckle bears a callus from holding a pencil. Everything about the physical item screams childhood. Given that, I expected an obliterating warmth upon rereading, a blurring of rough edges and forgiveness of narrative sins. Instead I found a largely readable book for any racing enthusiast. Which isn’t to say that Pretty Penny Farm is high literature, but its quality is surprising. The book sets name-drops of the Preakness and fair descriptions of racetrack personnel alongside an idyllic country setting and typical growing-pains teenage drama. It has two plots, neatly interlaced. It has a fine arc of character development for its girl protagonist, an array of reasonably fleshed-out side characters, a Buffalo reference (did you know I’m fond of the Sabres? Probably you could’ve guessed), a delightful mean girl, some doubtful dialect usage, and enough true-to-life racing action to satisfy--
Well, not the nitpickiest of readers, likely, but we must give snaps to Joanna Hoppe for creating a rural fair racetrack with a modest Thoroughbred purse, a couple of teen jockeys (including one who intends to make a career of it if he can)... and ooh, a ringer! That’s imaginative oomph far beyond the necessity of a one-hundred-thirty page YA romance novel. Being published when it was, this book predates the young-adult fiction explosion; it was one of many solo horse-girl books my mother scrounged up from used stores when I was small, carted along on road trips in a cardboard box with Moon and Me and Horsemaster. Pretty Penny Farm, fairly unique in its subgenre for the focus on racing, contained my first glimpses at contemporary American Thoroughbred sport. It’s a time capsule in more ways than one: it was written at a time when Rockingham was still alive, when bush tracks at county fairs might hold their own or at least cultivate a regional scene apart from whatever major city's track was nearest. I would’ve first read it during Virginia's period of live racing, and snippets of the text lodged themselves in my brain, images of “the dudes” at Rockingham in Salem, New Hampshire and the intoxicating gambling culture of UVA undergrads. Rereading the book now, on the back of press releases about the reopening of Colonial Downs, I felt as though I’d fallen into the story. What seemed wild and improbable to child me--racehorse smuggling, an apprentice jockey with an impossibly good colt--reads as basic Blood-Horse fodder these days. There is nothing in fiction nuttier than racing can manage by itself (which may be why Felix-Writing-As-Dick Francis’s attempts fail to thrill, but that’s another newsletter entirely).
"How'd you learn so much about riding?" Beth asked. "If there's only racing at the fair once a year, you can't have seen much."
"Read up on it," [Clammy] answered. "And I go hang around down at Rockingham any chance I get."
"What's Rockingham?"
"Only real racetrack in the state. They get some good hosses there. I shovel out the stables and hang around the bugs--"
"Bugs? You mean horseflies?"
Of course Clammy doesn't mean horseflies. Imagine my world rocked, to read a casual yet accurate exchange of racing lingo between characters who didn't have much effect on the larger field of children's literature. After all, Hoppe's book was no Twilight; it didn't set off an avalanche of inspiration and forever alter the landscape of publishing. Yet it’s strange and wonderful and always a little chagrining when you manage to dig down to your own bedrock. For better or worse, Pretty Penny Farm is part of my interior architecture, countless read-throughs in my childhood silently hollowing out a space in which my adult passions could thrive. The professional jock, Eduardo, who rides Beth dirty on the day of the Pearson Prize became my own Eddy, because the racialized, stereotypical description of a hardcore rider stuck in my brain, needling, bothering me before I understood why. Beth’s relationship with her father fed similar child-parent relationships in various projects. Beth and Charmin’, a classic horse-and-his-girl duo, are buried in the roots of Felix and Lucky. The romance between Beth and Dave is iffy (age gap!) and the characterization of Sophie is troubling (fatphobic!) and the entire shebang bar our aforementioned Eduardo is blazingly white even for New Hampshire and Connecticut, but these are the facts of the things that make us.
Why are we creating, if not to provide sharper lenses, more reflective mirrors?
Yours with an asterisk,
Diana