Why am I passionate about this?
I was a horse-crazy young girl whose passion for equines went dormant for 30 years. It reawakened when I turned 40, and I was again a lovelorn teenager, daydreaming about horses, plotting treks, swooning over the mere sight of an equine, even if it was online. One day in the late 90s at the dawn of the Google search engine, I happened upon a picture of a beauty, a dark horse with a thick mane blowing in the wind. It was an Icelandic horse, the photo taken on a misty green tussock in Iceland. That was it for me. I focused my equine passion (fair to call it an obsession) to that horse and that country.
Tory's book list on memoirs by women who love horses
Why did Tory love this book?
Nancy Marie Brown’s book came into my life at a most prescient time in my own horse history. I discovered her book at just the moment I was discovering this then rare breed, the Icelandic horse. In the late 1990s, Brown goes to Iceland searching for the perfect horse (gaedingur in Icelandic). The country was very different from the tourist magnet it is today. It was wilder, more isolated, less traveled. Brown is there in pursuit of a horse or two to bring home. She first arrives with her husband and eight-year-old son after a family trauma. They stay in a broken-down house, “a concrete box” without modern amenities. She tries her best to learn and converse in the native tongue with the local farmers. As she tests drive all the horses, the reader learns all about Icelandic horses and horse-buying. What adds such depth to this book is…
1 author picked A Good Horse Has No Color as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
After several visits to study the medieval Icelandic sagas, Nancy Marie Brown returns to Iceland to search for the perfect horse, one she can bring back to her Pennsylvania farm and make her own. She arrives shaken by tragedy, uncertain of the language, lacking confidence in her riding skills, but determined to make her search a success. She finds inspiration in the country’s austere and majestic landscape, which is alive with the ghosts of an adventure-filled past. In the glacier-carved hinterland, she rides a variety of Icelandic horses—some spirited, willful, even heroic; others docile, trusting, or tame. She also meets…