KAT AND BRANDY

With her third picture book, Schwarzenegger Pratt tells a story about a girl’s life-changing love for a horse, inspired by her own childhood.

Kat, a pigtailed, white-presenting girl who wears a pink headband, watches wistfully as her mother takes riding lessons. She makes “it all look so easy.” Kat’s love of horses conflicts with her fear of them; when she was younger, she was thrown from a startled pony. Kat wants to try riding again, “but the fall [keeps] replaying over and over in her head.” What will it take for Kat to face her fear? The answer is Brandy, a rescue pony who has a skittish personality that Kat can relate to; they gradually develop a rapport. There’s good stuff here on the benefits of an animal companion and on the rewards of patience, but will readers have the endurance to get there? Low on action, the story drags, hampered by dull, cliched writing (“giddy with excitement”).  It’s hard to imagine the narrative holding the interest of a kid who, unlike Kat, isn’t already smitten with horses. Brown’s delicate digital paintings show a steady hand, and her art has a determinedly bucolic look that would be at home in an American Girl book.

For hippophiles, and probably only hippophiles.