PIT PONY by Joyce Barkhouse & THE MEMORY CHAIR by Susan White,

   PIT PONY is set on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia in a coal-mining town in the early 1900s before automation. The men in families were miners and “owed their souls to the Company Store.” Coal mining was a brutal job, especially in this case, as the miles of tunnels stretched far beneath the Atlantic Ocean, and there was always a threat of flooding.

William “Willy” Maclean’s father and older brother both worked in the Ocean Deeps Mine. Because his mother had died, his 13-year-old sister kept the house together and watched over his little sisters. Willy went to school and wanted more than anything to escape “the pit” and make another kind of life for himself, but when he turned eleven in a few days, his job would be to support the family by going down there too.

He loved animals and longed to work with horses. After school on his eleventh birthday, he watched a ship unloading captured wild ponies from Sable Island. They also were doomed to live and work in the mines as he was. Willy saw a chestnut pony and cried at the thought she would give up her wild way of life for the blackness until she died.

Then his day came, and the days of darkness started. But a ray of happiness came to Willy in the dark tunnels when he was entrusted to work with and care for GEM, the pony he saw unloaded.  She ended up being the means of Willy’s escape to a life above ground.

It’s a sad-joyful story that clearly pictures the hard life of early miners and the means they needed to survive. It will stay in your thoughts, especially if you are claustrophobic!

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   THE MEMORY CHAIR is a family story about life in New Brunswick with a “fantastic” angle attached. Betony is a thirteen-year-old girl forced to visit her aged great-grandmother weekly with her mother and two younger brothers.  It’s hot and stuffy in the house, her “Gram” is grumpy and not connected to the modern world, and Betony would rather be anywhere else but THERE, until…..

One day, when the others are in the kitchen, Betony wanders over to her Gram’s old brown chair and plops down. She doses off, and suddenly, she is transported into the past. She experiences Gram’s life as a little girl, a teen, a new wife and mom, and an older woman AS IF IT WERE HER OWN MEMORY!

She is amazed, excited, and curious, but soon, her “knowledge” of her great-grandmother’s past opens her heart to the old woman. They begin to bond in mysterious and practical ways. And when the family’s old, shameful secret is exposed, Betony is able to bring the family together before it’s too late.

The book is exciting, unique, hopeful, sad, and joyful. There are “old ways” of doing things and harmful prejudices viewed with new eyes. Some are finally discarded, while others are embraced and carried on.  I enjoyed this book from both the girl’s viewpoint and the old woman’s.