Big Guy: A School Horse Story

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Julia Allen

Celia Ryker spent more than thirty years training horses and teaching riders on Southeast Michigan's hunter jumper circuit before she ever sat down to write this story. That biography matters enormously, because Big Guy has the specific, lived-in texture of a book written by someone who has known these animals from the inside out, who has watched their personalities and hierarchies and daily dignities up close for decades, and who knows exactly what it costs a horse to have the world it understood suddenly become unrecognizable.

Big Guy is a thoroughbred show horse at the top of his world when arthritis and age quietly end his winning days. His owner retires him to a school horse barn, which sounds gentle and is, in many ways, but it is also a complete dismantling of everything he has known. The coddled life of the show circuit, the predictable rhythms of the stall, the particular relationship with the person who knew him best, all of it replaced by open fields, a herd of new personalities, and small children who do not always hold on as well as they should.

Told entirely from Big Guy's point of view, the book works beautifully because Ryker never condescends to her readers or to her subject. The horse voices are distinct and funny and genuinely wise, and the observations Big Guy makes about his new world carry the kind of earned insight that only comes from a writer who has spent years thinking about how horses actually experience their lives. Shorty, Kaiser, and Slippy are supporting characters worth meeting, and Little Lisa, the smallest rider with the biggest heart, arrives in the story at exactly the right moment.

For fans of Black Beauty and A Horse Named Sky, the comparison is both apt and honest. Ryker is working in that same tradition of animal fiction that uses a non-human protagonist to illuminate something deeply human about belonging, change, and the friendships that outlast the circumstances that created them.

Uplifting, funny, and genuinely sweet, this is the kind of middle grade novel that stays with young readers long after the last page.

About the Author

Celia Ryker

Celia's first career was with horses. She trained horses and taught students on Southeast Michigan's hunter jumper circuit for more than thirty years. Her second career sent her back to school to study gardening fine arts and landscape design.

Celia has kept journals and written short stories and poems all of her life She has attended classes and writing seminars and has written articles for newsletters, local newspapers, and The League of Vermont Writers.

Celia, her husband Don, and their border collies Flurry and Winnie divide their time between Michigan and Vermont.