Recipe for The Hungry Place Recap

  Ingredients:

1 horse lovin’ girl without a mom aka Rae

1 hard working creative dad 

1 wise grandma aka Gammer

1 beautiful pony - Princess

1 kind hearted sickly owner - Roland

2 unsavory hired hands - Charlie, the trainer & his wife, Darlene

2 encouraging friends - Tully & Sam

1 concerned owner of pony camp - Tish

Mix together a girl who yearns for a pony and Princess, the pony who loses the charmed life she’s always known for an enduring story of hardship, resilience, patience and persistence. 

   The Hungry Place takes readers on a journey of hope. Gammer tells Rae, “I don’t see you as someone who doesn’t have a pony. You’re someone who’s going to have a pony. Focus your mind on it…eyes wide open for opportunities.”

   Add in wise advice from Gammer who tells Rae not to ask ‘will I have a pony? but instead ask, ‘How will I get a pony?’ When Rae decides to earn money to go to Pony Camp, Gammer tells her, “Money is useful. Don’t fall in love with it though. It’s like junk food, tastes good going down, ½ hour later you’re hungry again.”

   Blend in Roland being taken away in the ambulance, Charlie and Darlene cleaning him out. Ponies being left to fend for themselves for so long they ate the bark off the trees. Sadly, Roland had trusted the wrong people and his ponies had to pay the price.

   Stir in the meeting of an observant guy on a motorcycle and a brave pony that had never asked a human for anything in all her life.

   Princess is taken to Tish’s pony camp, where the vet doctors her wound and Tish is given strict instructions on how to feed the starved pony.

   The only pony Rae’s been riding is the metal one her dad created out of garbage he’d collected. She named him Rusty. Rae tells Tully and Sam that “ponies don’t panic. They think.They live longer than ponies. They have a different mind.”

   What has life given you? That’s what you have to work with. Rae uses what she has to move forward, “Without struggle, there is no progress”,  Frederick Douglass once said. Gammer calls these unexpected details ‘spice in the pie’. 

   Variation: “When Princess was abandoned she could be with the other ponies at last but…There were fences here too, invisible, but very real.” Do we put up fences unknowingly? When we, like Roland, choose the easy way for our loved ones, we can inadvertently bring them pain. He kept Princess isolated for her safety but her isolation made her life harder when everything went south.

    Enjoy an unforgettable book uniting a girl with a dream and a pony with a powerful purpose.