I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. Mine zoomed past in a maddening blur. Now that we have less kids living at home, we decided to downsize and put our house on the market a couple of days before Christmas. The weeks preceding Christmas day consisted of cleaning, packing, painting, and moving what felt like half of our belongings into storage in an effort to declutter. And you know what? I really like living in a lean, sparse house. With so many belongings in storage, I’m beginning to think we didn’t really need much of that stuff anyway. When the time comes, it will be interesting to see how much of it I want to move into the new house.
If we do sell the current house, this will be my fourteenth move. Lucky for me, I enjoy moving because it forces me to organize my possessions, not to mention the fact that I love change and get bored if I’m in one place too long.
Anyway, while I was packing, I came across my copy of The Crumb, a young adult novel by Jean Slaughter Doty. If you haven’t read her, I recommend you do. She deals with abuse issues in the show jumping world, so her books aren’t light reads, but they are wonderful reads. While looking for a cover photo, I discovered that Doty has published quite a few equine novels, and I’ll be looking for them. To learn more about her, check out this website: http://www.janebadgerbooks.co.uk/usa/doty.html.
Her writing is lovely and I highly recommend her for young adults and adults alike. In my search on the Internet, I was also reminded of a wonderful resource for finding equine reads: Ponydom. Visit them at http://www.ponydom.com/books/index.html.
Here’s to a great year of riding and reading!
Kit
www.kitehrman.com
Thanks Kit. I will definitely check out the sites and books. I'm always looking for good reads, especially about horses.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, Michele.
ReplyDeleteI love the site. It seems like the Y/A market is still fairly strong for horse stories. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteThe Monday Horses is another great book by JSD. I read it in middle school and it's still one of my favorites.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to reading The Monday Horse, too. I agree, mugwump, that the YA market is alive and well . . . thankfully!
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting the information about this author. We found Summer Pony at the library last night :)
ReplyDeleteI've always loved Doty's work, and was thrilled to see that two of her books, Summer Pony and Winter Pony, had come back into print a few years back.
ReplyDeleteAs I already had first editions of all of her books (that's actually a picture of my copy of The Crumb on Jane Badger's site!), I didn't zip out and buy new copies, but when I recently got an e-reader, and noticed that the books were available as ebooks, I thought "Why not? It might be fun to have them as an option on a long journey!".
And then came the very unpleasant discovery that the books had been dramatically altered, with both vocabulary and sentence structure simplified to a degree that the books are quite different from the originals. Jean Slaughter Doty, however, is still listed as the author, and there is no mention that the books have been adapted for a younger reader. Doty certainly didn't do the adaptations, as she has been dead for a number of years.
So...a heads up! The paperbacks in print appear to be identical to the ebooks, so if you want the genuine Doty article, buy the old editions used!
(And....erm....for the writers on this guild, you might want to look into ways of tying up your copyrights so that abased versions of your work doesn't appear in your name after you're gone!)
Susan, Thanks for that tip. I had no idea that could be done legally.
ReplyDelete