Reviews

My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara

hufflepuffyyyy587's review against another edition

hopeful reflective tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

birdkeeperklink's review against another edition

3.0

I was fortunate enough to read this as an adult, rather than as a child. Despite the simplistic writing and the fact that this is a 'boy and his horse' story, I don't believe this is really a book for children--at least not young children who have no parental guidance while reading.

At least one horse dies fairly gruesomely, and while it isn't described in detail, it's made pretty clear that the horse bled to death during an operation to remove an undescended testicle. Oh, and this is just a page after it's described how nice and sweet that same horse is, and how much Ken likes it. Young children will probably be traumatized if they're not warned about this in advance, and/or if their parent doesn't take the time to explain it and comfort them. Also, Flicka herself is in grave danger several times during the book.

Nevertheless, if the child is old enough and has an adult available to counsel them if necessary, I think they could handle it. It probably depends on the child and how sensitive they are.

Having read it as an adult, the simplistic writing made it a fast, easy read. I enjoyed it, but I felt O'Hara was trying to say too many things within the same book, so the messages sort of got tangled up and lost in each other. In the end, I wasn't sure what her point was. All 'deeper meaning' aside, it's a pretty good story as well. Ken is fairly likable, and of course Flicka is a sweetheart.

piperkitty81's review against another edition

5.0

I listened to this on Audible and it was very good. I had never read the book before so I didn’t expect certain events. Also, it’s set in the 40’s, I think and many things that were in the book may not make it past censors now. It was refreshing in that way and showed a more realistic picture of the joys and losses of working a ranch. One scene had me near tears.

abi_carter's review against another edition

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

jannyslibrary's review against another edition

2.0

I read this because my Grammy said this whole series was one of her favs... Sorry Grammy! It didn't connect with me.

All the horse talk was really boring imo and that was most of the book. The naturey bits focused on rural life in 1940s Wyoming were well written and beautiful, but oh God I really found this a slog. I read four other books since starting this because I really could only do like 30 pages at a time.

So, yeah, I didn't like Flicka at all and I find horse descriptions tedious. 乁( •_• )ㄏ

bugsmell's review against another edition

5.0

Umm I really wouldn’t categorize this as a YA horse book, I feel like it is just a western. Lots if adult stuff- violent and complicated and emotional. Okay there is a horse but its about the boy as much as it is her. I mean he doesn’t pet the damn thing until the book is almost over! Also the daddy is a scumbag for real. Loved this book though <3 adorable horsey

theteamsreader's review against another edition

adventurous challenging emotional inspiring medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

oviedorose's review against another edition

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective

3.0

jenniferfrye's review against another edition

5.0

He paused on the landing in front of the picture of the duck. If he stood there looking at the duck picture he could get into another world. He knew how to do it. To get into another world you had to make yourself the same size, in your mind. When he put his face down to the little pools in the stream and stayed there a long time, pretending that he was one of the little crabs that scuttled from rock to rock, or a baby trout smaller than a minnow, pretty soon he was right in that world under the water and could almost know why they moved about and went up so seriously to meet each other, talked a moment, then hurried away. It was one of the most exciting things, to get into another world than your own regular world, especially at a time when the regular world or the things you had to do in it bored you.

I had planned to give My Friend Flicka five stars simply because of the wonderful memories I have of reading it over and over and over again as a child, but this would easily be a five-star read even if I was encountering it for the first time as an adult. I was taken completely by surprise! (Rereading is funny that way. The plot itself I’d almost entirely forgotten, while certain scenes and lines stood out vividly—yet those scenes took on new, deeper meanings that had previously gone over my head.) Perhaps most surprising was that this novel is not solely told from Ken’s perspective: O’Hara also looks through the eyes of his parents (Nell and Rob), the Swedish farmhand (Gus), and even several horses (Banner, Rocket, Flicka).

My Friend Flicka is primarily a novel not about horses, but about growing up and learning responsibility. Ken, who is somehow 10 years old but acts and is treated like a much older child (in the tradition of the bygone days when children were expected to grow up quickly—a tradition that hasn’t entirely disappeared in some parts of the Midwest), begins the novel as an absentminded daydreamer whose vivid imagination keeps him a step removed from reality. Learning to overcome this, to “face facts” and accept the brutality of the world in which he lives, is the main focus of the book. Flicka herself is almost entirely absent from the first half of the novel, and is more often present in Ken’s thoughts then she is actually on the page.

However, it’s almost equally a novel about parenthood and marriage. Nell and Rob are presumably in their early 30s, only a few years older than I am now, and they have arguments and pillow talk just like any other married couple but unlike many parents in “children’s literature.” They are nuanced, complicated characters, and O’Hara portrays some profoundly intimate and moving moments.

It might be easy to dismiss Ken’s father as tyrannical and unsympathetic, but in actuality he is simply governed by the (sometimes brutal) principles of responsibility and practicality. In other words, he’s a cowboy, more or less inured to the hard facts of life and death that come with running a ranch (especially when dealing with money troubles, a constant undercurrent throughout the book). And his relationship with Ken—who is much more sensitive, taking more after Nell in disposition without Nell’s quiet strength—is a central part of the book. Both Ken and Rob want this to be the summer where they “become friends” with one another (though this sentiment goes unspoken), yet they struggle to understand or relate to one another. Their dynamic is eminently relatable to anyone who has felt at some point unable to connect with one parent over another.

O’Hara spends more time with Nell than Rob—and I absolutely adore Nell. She’s the perfect housewife and the perfect cowboy all in one, feminine and gentle but strong and determined, with a temper that occasionally gets the better of her. And she’s the one who understands Ken, who sees what he needs to grow and convinces Rob to go along with her plans, who is the peacemaker and mediator between the two of them. But she is also her own character: there’s one moment where she tells Ken that she always wanted a little girl, and if that doesn’t make your heart ache for her then I don’t know what will.

Even Ken’s older brother, Howard, initially set up as a bit of a bully, shows a softer, more complex side, offering to do Ken’s chores so he can spend more time with Flicka. Sibling dynamics are complex, and while Howard doesn’t often appear, O’Hara has still taken the time to make him just as well-rounded as the others.

And last, but certainly not least, is the writing. My Friend Flicka has some of the most gorgeous, evocative nature writing I’ve ever read. O’Hara writes with so much color in her landscapes, which are lush and vibrant and perfectly capture the feel of Wyoming. Yet her prose is spare and delicate: she doesn’t go on for pages and pages describing the grass or the sky (not that I’d complain if she did) because she doesn’t need to. I absolutely lost myself in the world she’d created. That includes emotionally, too—she handles her characters with the same subtle, crystal-clear delicacy as she does her settings, and I absolutely bawled my eyes out several times. All told, it’s a novel that feels timeless.

Some favorite passages:

Now, all the clouds in the sky had caught the sunrise colors, and there was a mingling of pink and red and gold and a keen blue, like electricity, and a wind that was boisterous, like someone scuffling with you, and it played and rippled over the greengrass and made it look like watered silk—

“Oh, Mother, it isn’t just the riding. I want a colt to be friends with me. I want him to be mine—all my own, Mother—" As she looked down into the upturned face, her heart misgave her at the passion and intensity of his longing, but she understood. Yes, she, too, was like that—all my own—and she turned away and began to clear the table.

She heard the jack pines roaring—like surf, she thought, yes, like the sea.

Ken sat, gathering up the threads that stretched from the events behind him to the events ahead.

There’s a responsibility we have towards animals,” said his father. “We use them. We shut them up, keep their natural food and water away from them; that means we have to feed and water them. Take their freedom away, rope them, harness them, that means we have to supply a different sort of safety for them. Once I've put a rope on a horse, or taken away its ability to take care of itself, then I've got to take care of it. Do you see that? That noose around her neck is a danger to her, and I put it there, so I have to get it off.

The East is cozy. There is never the distance, the far, empty distances—the wide loneliness. Miles and miles before you come to another house. Just animals. Grass and animals and sky. You can smell the loneliness.

She clapped her hands and yelled for them to come, and Rob dropped his shovel and ran at her, and Ken stopped tying his necktie to watch. His mouth was open and there was a smile on his face because it was always fun when his father and mother started playing. She dodged and ran around the fountain, and her husband chased her and reached out a hand and caught her sash and undid it, and she screamed and ran for the steps, and both dogs ran in between them barking and almost tripped him up.

On the way downstairs he stopped before the picture of the duck. It was a big black duck with white breast and legs and white bars on his wings. He was fierce and handsome standing on his rock, just about to launch himself into the waves of the grey, choppy lake. There was such a reaching in his eager beak and one lifted foot and the forward tilt of his body, Ken felt as if it dragged him in too. In another second he would feel the icy sting and shock of the water, the bitter cold, sharp, up-pricked waves, and the greyness of the misty air hanging over it, full of fear and loneliness. His skin went gooseflesh.

He had a sharp consciousness of change and new importance. Things had begun at last. Things could be real now.

As Nell read out the list of yearlings and the names of their dams Ken began to feel queer. These were definite flesh and blood animals; named, described, tagged, in a book; not the colts that had kicked their heels and played and tossed their manes in his dreams. He felt the sense of loss which every dreamer feels when the dream moves up, comes close, and at last is concrete.

People grow up that way,” said Nell. “In spurts. All of a sudden, they are years older.”

The hide was not yet dry; particles of flesh still clung to teeth and tiny hoofs; the hair of tail and mane lay in a swirl over the skeleton. It was in one of the caves at the base of Castle Rock that Howard had come upon it, and after the first triumphant cry which called his father and Ken to him, they had stood without speaking, and there was no sound except for the angry humming of the flies that finally settled again on the carcass, shining, greenish, and busy.

Always at night her fatigue was a positive pressing thing. She could feel it all through her, a heavy, sweet aching. And yielding to it was like sinking into a sucking depth. Her thoughts began to scatter into grotesque formations like pieces of broken glass.

Spoiler

Jingo, the risling,

died. McLaughlin never allowed anyone to show, or even to feel, any grief about the death of the animals. It was an unwritten law to take death as the animals take it, all in the day’s work, something natural and not too important; forget it. Close as they were to the animals, making such friends of them, if they let themselves mourn them, there would be too much mourning. Death was all around them—they did not shed tears.

There was deep meadow grass in the bottom, timothy and redtop; there was gamma grass on the sides of the slopes that shut them in; there was, best of all, high clover at the base of the hill above where a spring burst through the ground in a dozen bubbling holes. The water loitered in winding runlets, and at last joined to make a little stream, and the stream made a bed of moist earth for a copse of cottonwoods and aspen, and the shade and moisture made food and cover for a thicket of raspberry and gooseberry bushes and wildflowers; bluebells with yard-long stems as fine as hairs, white Mariposa lilies with pansy dark hearts, and the wild forget-me-not blossoms like tiny seeds of turquoise, and larkspur—pink, white, and blue—death to cattle and horses.

There wasn’t enough light yet for him to see anything clearly. It seemed a world of near-darkness, in which vague outlines appeared and vanished, floating and shadowy. His thoughts were like that, too. He groped for familiar footing in his mind, but everything was changed. Something new had come into him so that he was different. Even Tim said that he had grown an inch since his father promised him the colt, and Howard treated him as if he was important. But something had gone out of him, too; and sometimes he wanted it so that he was in a panic. It was a place he used to play and be happy in; quite secret, no one knew he was there; and safe, because he had everything his own way; pleasant, because there were no unhappy endings. In the real world just about everything had an unhappy ending or tripped him up somehow, but there, there were no endings at all—dreams don’t end—one piles on another—dreams just drift, like a picture or a view with mist over it, and then, in the mist, another picture taking shape—always one putting the other out—never an end. He had been, in a way, trying to get back to this place all week, as if it was his last chance—

There was a magical clear light over the world that seemed to emanate from the soft indigo of the sky. Right over the Hill opposite the Green was one golden star. It twinkled coquettishly, and not very far off in the sky a single, coiled mass of white cloud winked back. The cloud was full of lightning, and went on and off like an electric light. For as long as ten seconds it would flash into illumination, filled through and through with rose and gold light, then would blink a few times and go out, rumbling softly. The star twinkled merrily back. Nothing else in all the twilight world moved; it was as if everything watched the little play between the star and the cloud. At last the sky was crowded with stars, and the cloud, grumbling and flashing intermittently, moved off and disappeared behind the hills.

All of this talk drifted hazily through Ken's mind, while he watched the bumble bee boring its way into a half opened petunia bud. The bee was completely hidden and the weight of it bowed the blossom almost to the ground. Ken waited to see it come out again. What a world that must be to get into, the very heart of a little flower—if he was a bumble bee now—

Gently the darkness folded down over her. She was alone, except for the creatures of the sky—the heavenly bodies that wheeled over her; the two Bears, circling around the North Star; the cluster of little Sisters clinging together as if they held their arms wrapped around each other; the eagle, Aquila, that waited till nearly midnight before his great hidden wings lifted him above the horizon; and right overhead, an eye as bright as a blue diamond beaming down, the beautiful star, Vega. Less alive than they, and dark under their brilliance, the motionless body of Flicka lay on the blood-stained grass, earth-bound and fatal, every breath she drew a costly victory.

In his eyes she saw a question. He was asking if it wouldn't come true, if he wanted it hard enough; and his face was strained in anguish. Right now, she thought, narrowing her eyes against the tears that came so quickly, stinging them, right now—to let him know, once for all, that wanting and wishing can’t buck a fact.

Ken turned over on his back and looked up at the sky. It was close, it was a deep blue, but not opaque; it looked as if you could go into it, farther and farther… Thinking this way, just drifting, he began to feel better. There were well-trodden paths in his mind that led out and away from the real, and on and into limitless worlds of fancy. He stopped thinking about Flicka. Stopped thinking about anything real. In that other world of fancy, there were colts and fillies too. He wanted the make-believe colt that couldn’t hurt itself, that could fly over six-foot fences, that needn’t be broken and trained, that couldn't be loco, that would carry him on its back as easily as a bird carries one of its own feathers… He began to feel comfortable and free … this was the way … this was the way…

Rob stood up, picked up his boots, kicked the boot-jack back into the corner, went over to Nell, and with the boots hanging in one hand, put the other arm around her. “Love me?” he asked. “I knew you were going to say that!” she exclaimed angrily. “When you've just made me mad, that isn’t any time to say things like that.

It was not only his hands that had changed. All the listlessness of the day-dreamer, the sliding away from reality, had gone. He looked, stood, moved, eagerly and with determination. He was in love. He was in the very core of life, and he wrestled with it as Jacob wrestled with the angel.

BY THE time the harvest moon, as yellow as saffron, rose over the dark sky-line of the eastern horizon, and hung there, trembling behind the pulsations of the atmosphere, there was the smell of autumn on the wind and a blanket of dazzling fresh snow on the Neversummer Range. When the breeze veered to the south, the smell of it blew over the ranch, alien and challenging like the startle of unexpected fingers tapping at the door. There were different flowers in the dells and along the streams. No longer the pink and blue and white of spring and early summer—larkspur and delphinium and bluebells. Instead, feathery goldenrod; black-eyed susans; asters; everything gold and purple, now, for the fall.

She never felt that she had quite completed an experience until she had shared it with Rob.

The night was silent, with the profound silence of a sea becalmed. Even the faint roaring of the earth, like the roaring in a shell, was hushed. It waited. If the mind of a living being—man or beast—is clear, there are forewarnings of the approach of death. The body gets ready. One by one the active functions cease, till, at last, the currents of living force become inverted in a down-whirling spiral into which the creature is drawn, spinning faster and faster toward the vortex. All of this can be felt; and, feeling this,

Spoiler

Flicka knew that her time had come.

“Well—" Nell spoke slowly, thoughtfully, “a dreamer —you know—it’s a mind that looks over the edges of things—the way Ken can do what he calls ‘getting into other worlds’; gets into a picture; gets into a drop of water; gets into a star—anything—"

The leaves of the young cottonwoods had turned to gold; and at every puff of wind a shower of them floated down with a soft rustling sound. Nell’s eyes roved farther, and she suddenly realized that all the color had gone from the world. This always happened in the fall, quite unexpectedly; and there was no more richness of the summer blues and greens and reds; the landscape became drab and seemed to shrink in size, and so would remain until the snow came and transformed it again.

It’s really a pretty serious business making a practical thinker and performer out of a day-dreamer. It's something that psychiatrists often have to do—or try to do. Mostly they fail. Day-dreaming is as potent and seductive as morphine. Once you've got the habit, it’s got you. Lots of children do it; I think it’s quite rare that it's understood or recognized in childhood when, perhaps, something could be done about it. Mostly it goes on into adult life—perhaps all life long. When doctors or psychiatrists get it to deal with, it's the results of it they see; inefficiency, failure, dishonesty, inability to cope with life, and then it’s usually too late to correct the habit.

Anyway, that’s what you did, and the result has taken this boy through most of the great experiences of life: falling in love; bliss; despair; sacrifice; death. If you could do that to every day-dreamer, you could probably cure them all.”

michalanne's review against another edition

5.0

This was an awesome book. The movie did not do a good job of portraying it, but it was a good movie. Not half as good as the book though!!