If Wishes Were Horses

Entertaining, beguiling and surprising in equal measure, If Wishes Were Horses is the story of one girl's childhood obsession with ponies and the complex relationship that women have had with horses across the centuries.

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Susanna Forrest grew up in the 1980s near Norwich and, like many a girl, she yearned for a pony. She never did get one of her own, but this didn't stop her becoming obsessed with all things equine.

If Wishes Were Horses is the story of that all-consuming interest. As Susanna's journey unfolds, it leads her to horse-fixated princesses, recovering crack addicts, national heroines and runaways across the ages. From girl-riders of the Bronze Age, to lavishly adorned equestrian Victorians and twenty-first-century children on horseback in Brixton, she explores the development of this Pony Cult from its earliest times to the present day. In doing so, she takes to the saddle once more and rediscovers her own riding legs in this frank, eclectic and captivating memoir of an ever-changing equine world.