Journalist Sarah Maslin Nir never expected to write fiction for children. But when an opportunity arose, and horses were involved, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated New York Times reporter couldn’t say nay. Starting this spring, Cameron Kids will publish Maslin Nir’s Once Upon a Horse series for middle grade readers. First out of the gate will be The Flying Horse on March 14, followed by a fall book, The Jockey and Her Horse, historical fiction about pioneering Black female jockey Cheryl White and her thoroughbred, Jetolara. (Maslin Nir co-wrote Jockey with White’s brother, Raymond White Jr.) A third novel is in the works.
Once Upon a Horse was inspired by Maslin Nir’s 2020 memoir Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal. “Horse Crazy is about the search for what compels obsession, specifically my own, and about obsession writ large,” she said. “It’s a little bit like The Orchid Thief for horses.” She adds that she’s a competitive show jumper and serves on the advisory board for the inclusive, therapeutic-riding nonprofit GallopNYC. She also owns five horses. “I bought them with my book advance,” she said. “My mom was like, ‘Are you sure you want to spend your advance on this?’ I said, ‘Mom, the book is called Horse Crazy, not Horse Sane.’”
Cameron Kids editor Amy Novesky knows what horse obsession feels like. In 2020, she revived a childhood pursuit of horseback riding as a way to get outdoors during the pandemic. “Riding allows you to be present—I find my blood pressure immediately drops,” Novesky said. Before long, she “was all about horses. When I came across Horse Crazy, I loved the real respect for story and people that comes through. I thought, gosh, what about adapting some of the stories to kids’ books?” She sent Maslin Nir a note via Instagram, reasoning that she had nothing to lose.
Maslin Nir sensed a kindred spirit. “I love my agent, Flip Brophy, but this was a little bit agent-free,” she said. “Amy Novesky slid into my DMs after reading Horse Crazy, and she’s a horse girl too.” The author and editor began imagining a middle grade series of realistic horse stories, starting with The Flying Horse, whose chapters alternate between a New York City 13-year-old and a Netherlands-born horse named Trendsetter.
An investigative reporter at heart, Maslin Nir approached The Flying Horse as a roman à clef. “Everything in it is true,” she said. “Trendsetter is a real horse—he happens to be my horse. He really was born in Luttelgeest.” She visited the Spanish Hofreitschule in Austria, where Lippizan horses and equestrians are trained, and she based her characters on individuals like Hannah Zeitlhofer, the woman who became the first female student in the riding school’s history in 2008. To learn how Trendsetter, a bay breed known as a Dutch warmblood, arrived in the U.S. by plane, Maslin Nir did her homework: “I flew in the cargo hold with nine Dutch warmbloods,” and invented an animal handler to watch over them with care. (That character’s name, Julian Okwonga, references Maslin Nir’s New York Times friend Musa Okwonga.)
The Flying Horse’s teenage protagonist, Sarah, shares more than a first name with the author. Throughout the novel, Sarah hides her dyslexia from her family and teachers, and only feels understood when interacting with horses. “I struggled with a learning disability, just like Sarah, but not quite as severe as hers,” Maslin Nir said. In the book, Sarah’s Russian Jewish grandmother remembers escaping a WWI-era Russian pogrom via a horse-drawn wagon; the character pays tribute to Nir’s father, Yehuda Nir, who detailed his memories of the Holocaust in a memoir, The Lost Childhood. An author’s note in The Flying Horse provides readers with these connections.
Horse Action Figures and a Barn-to-Barn Tour
Maslin Nir made The Flying Horse a redemptive story, with “a tone of gentleness” that she found lacking in novels like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. “We want the series to feel like the horse books we grew up with—traditional, descriptive narratives, maybe read slowly and savored,” Novesky said, thinking back to Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague books and Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series. She describes The Flying Horse as having “a classic style mixed with reportage and modern language.” (Novesky has her own horsey picture book, If You Want to Ride a Horse, forthcoming next year from Holiday House, edited by Neal Porter Books executive editor Taylor Norman and illustrated by Gael Abary.)
Ulterior motives may have been involved in the writing process, too. “Like, literally the whole reason I wrote these books was to get a Breyer [model toy horse] made of Trendy,” Maslin Nir said. She’d written about Breyer collectibles in Horse Crazy, and “when I got Covid—one of the first people in New York, because I covered the outbreak in New Rochelle—Breyer actually sent me a one-of-a-kind model of Trendy as a get-well present.”
Although there will be no mass-produced version of Trendsetter, there will be a Breyer toy set to supplement the second book, The Jockey and Her Horse, which commemorates Cheryl White. At age 17, White became “the first-ever female Black jockey to win a race in America,” Maslin Nir said. The author especially wants to shed light on “the Black contribution to thoroughbred racing. The first-ever winner of the first-ever Kentucky Derby was a Black man; the first 13 winners of the first 15 races were Black, and then they were sort of Jim Crowed out of the sport as it became a more lucrative profession.” She called White “a Serena Williams and Venus Williams of her time, and her story has faded from history.”
Meanwhile, Maslin Nir plans a “barn-to-barn tour” for The Flying Horse, which developed from her Covid-era promotion strategy. “When Horse Crazy came out in August 2020, I was so deeply disappointed because my entire book tour was canceled,” she said. “I put some woe-is-me posts on Facebook and people invited me to their barns because it’s outdoors. It felt like a healing moment.” This time around, she has lined up more than 25 stables, therapeutic riding programs, 4H clubs, and bookstores, including a storytime at the National Horse Racing Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a reading at the Winter Equestrian Festival in Wellington, Fla.
Horses, and “people bonded by a passion” for them, are for her “a source of energy and revitalization.” This tour, she’s telling everyone, “Invite me to your barn and we can have a party in the field.” She’s still taking requests.
