The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

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An exceptional and moving novel about the power of the imagination from a New York Times bestselling author, illustrated by the winner of the Kate Greenaway medal.Described by Michael Morpurgo as "a remarkable book": December 1941; Britain is at war. Emmaline has been evacuated away from the bombs to Briar Hill Hospital in Shropshire. When she gets there she discovers a secret. It's not to be shared, not to be told to anyone, even her friend Anna. But she'll tell you. This is Emmaline's secret. There are winged horses that live in the mirrors of Briar Hill. Exquisitely illustrated by Levi Pinfold, winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal, The Secret Horses of Briar Hill has all the makings of a modern classic.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

1     I have a secret.   I won't tell Benny and the other boys. They are like dogs in the night, snarling at anything that moves, chasing cats along country roads just for the thrill of watching them run. I won't tell Anna, either, even though she is nice to me and shares her colored pencils, even the turquoise one that is her favorite because it reminds her of the sea near her home. Sister Constance tells me that Anna could die soon, and I should be careful and quiet around her. Around Anna I have to tiptoe, I have to pretend that everything is okay, I have to keep secrets to myself.   But I'll tell you.   This is my secret: there are winged horses that live in the mirrors of Briar Hill hospital.         2     Anna is asleep again.   I lie on the foot of her bed so that I won't wake her, drawing on the backs of the war pamphlets Sister Constance keeps in a stack by the fireplace for the groundskeeper, Thomas, to use as kindling for the wood he has chopped. There is a gilded mirror above Anna's chest of drawers. It reflects the mirror-me. The mirror-Anna, snoring. The mirror-room, with its wool blankets strung over the window to hide our lights from outside at night. And, standing in the mirror-doorway, is a winged horse that isn't in Anna's room at all. The mirror-horse is nosing through the half-finished cup of tea that Anna left on her bedside table. He has a soft gray muzzle that is beaded with droplets of tea, and quicksilver hooves, and snow-white wings folded tightly. It's hard to capture with a pencil how horse ears are both round and pointy at the same time.   Benny comes in and sneers at my drawing. His thin red hair, combed back with a wide part down the middle, and his sharp hungry eyes make me think of the rawboned hunting dogs that are always looking for something to make a meal of.   "Horses don't have horns," he says.   "Those are its ears."   "They don't have wings, either."   My hand tightens around the pencil. "Some of them do."   Benny rolls his eyes. "Sure, and Bog is actually a dragon, even though he looks like a flea-bitten old collie."   Anna wakes, then, and tells Benny to leave, and he does because Anna is the oldest and because she asks him nicely.   "Come here, Emmaline," Anna says, "and show me what you've drawn."   She wraps her cardigan around my shoulders as I crawl into bed next to her, and gives me a tight squeeze, as snug as if I were home. "What lovely creatures," she says as she inspects my drawing. "You've such an imagination."   She smiles warmly, but she smells sour, like milk left outside too long. Her face is very pale, except for the places where it is so red it looks chapped, even though it has been many weeks since she has been outside.   I glance at the mirror.   The winged horse has grown bored with Anna's tea and is backing out of the mirror-room, bumping his rump against the tight angles of the mirror-hallway. I cover my mouth to keep from giggling. Anna can't see the winged horses in the mirrors.   No one can--only me.   It was late summer when I first arrived at Briar Hill. Sister Constance took me straight to her office and removed the identification tag pinned to my coat. While she made notations in a ledger, I tried to smooth my tufts of hair in the mirror above her desk. Then, completely out of nowhere, completely without warning, a winged horse clomped straight through the mirror-doorway, prim as anything, tail held high, as though Sister Constance's office were the exact place he was looking for.   "A horse!" I yelled, pointing at the mirror. He was nosing around Sister Constance's desk. "With wings! And it's eating your ruler!"   Sister Constance gave me a look like I'd said Winston Churchill was holding a pink parasol while riding an elephant across occupied France.   "There!" I pointed to the mirror again. "Now it's gotten your pencil!"   She turned to the mirror.   She looked back at me.   She called for the doctor.   Dr. Turner came and felt my forehead, and they spoke quietly to each other by the windows while I tapped my finger against the mirror again and again and again like I used to do with the live fish in the tanks at the fishmonger's. The horse didn't turn. He didn't glance at me at all. He just leaned against the blackboard and fell asleep, while outside Sister Constance's door, I heard the other children whispering about me.   "Emmaline?" Anna asks. "What are you giggling about?"   I look away from the winged horse with tea on his muzzle. Anna coughs, pressing her hankie to her mouth. Something stirs in my lungs too, still and thick as swamp water. It makes me think of the expression Mama uses when Papa teases me for being sullen. She'll look up from her book with a smile and say, Leave her be, Bill. There's mystery in the quiet ones. Still waters run deep.   And this--this liquid, this sickness--there is nothing in the world that could run deeper.   "Emmaline?" Anna squeezes my shoulder.   "It's nothing."   Anna hands me back my drawing. With my thick pink eraser, I rub away the ears that I've drawn wrong.   "You like horses, don't you?" she asks. Even with her cough, her voice is gentle.   I blow away the bits of crumbled eraser. I start to redraw the ear. Benny is daft if he thinks it looks like a horn.   "We had workhorses at the bakery," I say, and add a little tuft of hair coming from its ear. "A big gelding and two bay mares. Spice, Nutmeg, and Ginger. They were beautiful. They had sandy brown hair and dark manes. They wouldn't ever come when the bakery boys called to them, but they never ran away from me."   "I guess horses can tell a lot about people," Anna says.   I look up at her. Her eyebrows are knit together. It is the same look that Sister Constance gets when she goes into the kitchen pantry to take inventory of the dusty cans of ham. There are fewer and fewer of them each week.   "You must miss them terribly," Anna adds, reaching out to brush back my hair. "I'm sure once you go home they'll come right up to their stall doors, begging for an apple." She starts coughing again, but pretends it's just a tickle, and takes a sip of cold tea. "You can tell them stories about these flying horses in your drawings. Perhaps, long ago, they were cousins."   I stop drawing.   Anna is looking toward the window, as though something has caught her eye. When Dr. Turner told her she couldn't leave the bed again, the Sisters pinned back a corner of the hanging wool blanket so that she could have some fresh air. In the hand mirror propped by her bedside table, there's a flicker of movement. A winged horse is passing by in the mirror-world outside. I can catch only a glimpse of him in the reflected window. He stretches his wings like he's been asleep all morning. Anna's eyes jerk toward the mirror. Her eyebrows knit together again, more curiously this time.   Has she seen it?   Has she seen the winged horse?   After that first day in Sister Constance's office, I haven't spoken of the winged horses again--except secretly, just a little, to Anna. Everyone else snickers at me behind my back, but Anna would never do that.   And for a moment, as she studies the mirror, I think she might see the horse too.   But then she sighs, and adjusts the barrette in her hair, and flips her Young Naturalist's Guide to Flora and Fauna open to one of the many dog-eared pages. She looks up, giving me one of her warm, soft Anna smiles. But she can't muffle her cough with a handkerchief this time. It makes the whole bed shake.         3     Sister Constance has made a new rule. It happened after Benny found one of the chickens torn apart just after breakfast. He came screaming into the kitchen with the dead bird, making its dead wings flap, shaking its dead head, sending Sister Mary Grace into the pickling room in tears. Sister Mary Grace is the youngest nun, in charge of cooking and cleaning. She's not that much older than Anna, and Anna would cry too, if she saw a dead, bloody bird. Then Sister Constance scolded Benny and told Thomas to bury the bird in the grassy patch of land behind the barn, while she drummed on a tea tin at lunch to get our attention.   "No children are allowed beyond the kitchen terrace, on account of the foxes," she said.   But after lunch, I sneak beyond the terrace anyway.   I want to watch Thomas bury the bird. The others are scared of him, though he is only twenty--barely a man. Benny says he is a monster. But Sister Constance says God gave Thomas only one arm for a reason, and that reason was so that he couldn't go fight the Germans like the other young men in the village, so that he would stay here with us, in the hospital, and take care of the chickens and the sheep and the turnip patch, so that we would have vitamins to keep us strong. I know that Sister Constance can't lie because she's a nun, but, sometimes, I'm scared of Thomas too. Which is why I hide behind the woodpile while I watch him bury the dead chicken.   It's the start of December, and the ground is hard, and it must be difficult for him to dig with one arm, but he manages. Where the other arm should be there is only a sleeve fastened to his shoulder with a big silver diaper pin. He lays the dead chicken in the hole. When he thinks no one is looking, he runs his fingers over the chicken's white, white feathers, and I wonder if it feels the same on his fingers as it would on mine, if soft feathers feel the same for Benny and Anna and Sister Constance and Thomas and me, or if it's only beneath my hands that chickens feel warm and alive, like stones left in the sun. Then Thomas buries the bird under red dirt, and the bird is gone.         4     Dr. Turner comes every Wednesday to administer our medication in the little room that was once a butler's pantry. "Tell me how you are feeling, Emmaline," he says kindly. Everything about Dr. Turner is kind. The way he warms his stethoscope before he presses it against my skin. The chocolate squares he slips me when Sister Constance isn't looking. The wink he gives me with his woolly gray caterpillar eyebrows.   Dr. Turner is like Thomas: He isn't whole. Only whole men can go to war to fight the Germans. But what Dr. Turner is missing isn't an arm or a leg or even a finger. It's a part of his heart. It's the daughter and wife he lost to the bombs. The missing part that makes him twitch when there is a thunderstorm, and that one time, when lightning struck the roof and he crawled under the kitchen table and made a strange whining sound like a dog, until Sisters Constance and Mary Grace coaxed him out with weak tea, and sweat was soaking into the armpits of his white coat.   Dr. Turner puts the end of his stethoscope on my back and listens while I breathe. Lining the room, the shelves that used to hold fancy plates are now filled with pill bottles and iodine swabs and tongue depressors.   "Are you taking your medication, Emmaline?"   In the full-length examination mirror behind him, a winged horse is scratching its ear against the window frame.   "Yes, Doctor."   He frowns as if he might not believe me, and then pulls out a pad of paper and a pencil that he wets on his tongue. He turns his back to lean on the cabinet while he writes, and I make a face at the horse; it keeps on scratching its ear. I wonder what it sees, when it looks through the mirror, back at me. I wonder if the mirror-world feels any different from ours: if, over there, cold is still cold, and hot is still hot, and if Sister Constance's rulers really taste as good as the horses make them look.   Dr. Turner finishes writing, folds the note in half, and hands it to me. "Give this to Sister Constance to take to the chemist in Wick."   "Yes, Doctor."   "And paste this outside your door. I noticed the last one fell off."   He hands me a blue ticket. He uses the tickets so the Sisters will know what treatment we need each week. There are three colors: Blue for patients who are well enough to go outside for exercise and fresh air. Yellow for those who must limit their activity to indoors. Red for the ones--the one, because it is only Anna--too ill to leave their beds.   Dr. Turner starts to leave, distracted, and I clear my throat loudly so that I'm sure he will hear. He pats his jacket pocket. "Ah. Almost forgot." He hands me a chocolate wrapped in tinfoil, just like the soldiers get in their ration packs. "Our little secret, yes?"   I smile.   I am very good at secrets. I haven't told anyone about the time I saw Jack peeing on a hedgehog by the woodshed, and he let me play with his Lionel steam engine if I stayed quiet.   Well, now you know, but you can keep a secret too. I can tell.   Dr. Turner consults his list. "Send in Kitty next."   I slip off the examination table and pop my head into Sister Constance's classroom, where she is giving the little ones their spelling lesson, to tell Kitty it's her turn. Then I march down the hall. We older children don't have our lessons until the afternoon, so my time is my own, for a little while at least. The mirrors here are empty, but the floors shake, and I wonder if winged horses are walking down it in their world behind the mirrors, or if it is just Thomas banging around on the furnace below. I match the thunk-thunk-thunk with my steps until I reach the narrow staircase. I peek over my shoulder for any wild-dog boys with parted red hair. Clear. I dart up the stairs, past the residence level, then up again toward the attic, start unwrapping Dr. Turner's chocolate, and I am just about to take a bite when a face jumps out of the shadows. Excerpted from The Secret Horses of Briar Hill by Megan Shepherd All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Shepherd (The Cage) blends the historical with the fantastical in her deeply moving first middle grade novel, set during WWII. Twelve-year-old narrator Emmaline is convalescing in a hospital in the British countryside for children with "stillwaters," the girl's term for tuberculosis. Emmaline chafes at the requirement to remain cloistered indoors, and instead sneaks off to the sundial garden on the estate's grounds. Emmaline believes she sees winged horses in the hospital's mirrors, and when a horse with a broken wing appears in the sundial garden, having apparently crossed over from the mirror world, Emmaline resolves to protect her from a malevolent black horse. Shepherd's strong supporting cast includes a benevolent doctor, a one-armed handyman named Thomas, a kind older girl named Anna, and a boisterous group of boys, as well as the nuns who tend to them. Shepherd leaves the story's fantasy elements tantalizingly open-ended-it's for readers to decide whether the winged horses Emmaline sees and the "Horse Lord" she corresponds with are products of her rich imagination-yet the magic in the relationships she builds, even the tragic ones, is undeniable. Ages 10-up. Author's agent: Josh Adams, Adams Literary. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

School Library Journal Review

Gr 5-8-Emmaline May is the only one who can see the winged horses in the mirrors of Briar Hill Hospital. While their fathers and brothers are off fighting in World War II, the children at Briar Hill are fighting their own battles with tuberculosis. Emmaline tries to tell the others about the horses, but no one believes her. When one horse is trapped at Briar Hill with a broken wing, Emmaline must keep him safe until it heals, but there is a dark and sinister force waiting for the creature. Through her friend Anna, who also has tuberculosis, and Thomas, the lonely young caretaker, who is missing an arm, Emmaline holds tight to her faith in the horses. But when tragedy strikes and the horrors from her past emerge, she must find the courage to keep believing. Fiona Hardingham, a captivating narrator, conveys the bleakness of the children's situation while also keeping just the right amount of hope in her voice. VERDICT Part heartrending reality, part hopeful fairy tale. It is easy to tell that Shepherd was influenced by "Narnia" and The Secret Garden. Readers of those classics will enjoy this. ["Chapters are all very short and well formed around single events, giving the book a choppy unevenness that emphasizes how silly Emmaline's quest really is": SLJ 8/16 review of the Delacorte book.]-Sarah Flood, Breckinridge County Public Library, Hardinsburg, KY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In the midst of WWII England, Emmaline is sent to the countryside to live at Briar Hill Hospital, where all the children Emmaline included suffer from stillwaters (TB). Blackout curtains keep out the light; illness and nuns' habits pervade the hospital; and her closest friend, Anna, is so sick that she cannot venture outside. Emmaline constantly seeks escape, both by going into the drab winter gardens and by seeing winged horses in the mirrors inside the hospital. When she discovers an injured winged horse named Foxfire has escaped the mirror world and taken shelter in the sundial garden, Emmaline's life takes on purpose: she must help protect Foxfire from Volkrig, the black-winged horse that threatens Foxfire while she heals. Narrated by Emmaline, whose health grows steadily weaker as the story progresses, this quietly powerful novel draws in the reader with its magic realism. Endearing characters, metaphors for life and death, and a slow revelation of the horrors of war give this slim novel a surprising amount of heft. In her middle-grade debut, Shepherd blurs the line between real and imaginary, leaving room for readers to debate the story's meaning. Classics such as Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and C. S. Lewis' Narnia books inform this moving, magically tinged slice of historical fiction.--Moore, Melissa Copyright 2016 Booklist

Horn Book Review

While hospitalized with tuberculosis during World War II, Emmaline gets caught up in a quest involving winged horses that she believes only she can see. Letters from a mysterious Horse Lord guide her as her illness worsens. Accompanied by occasional full-page black-and-white silhouette illustrations, this atmospheric tale leaves readers to decide for themselves: does Emmaline die or does she live? (c) Copyright 2017. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.