A little girl's best friend

Dogs may think they are man's best friend, but where women are concerned, they are not really contenders. For a certain sort of little girl (you can spot them in the playground, uttering shrill whinnies and lashing their thighs with lengths of twig) ponies are a passion far more consuming than the callow fancy of their peers for pop idols.

And while girls who once believed they would die unless they married George Michael generally prefer, post-adolescence, to forget they felt anything so uncool, horsey girls often go right on being horsey, sometimes to the exclusion of other attachments.

These are the women who gave Melissa Holbrook Pierson the material for her latest book, Dark Horses & Black Beauties. And she is perfectly qualified to describe their sentiments, because she shares them. Essentially, Holbrook Pierson "knows" that there is something special going on between horses and girls because she herself feels it, and this high-octane blend of instinct and emotion is what fuels her book. Not that she tries to conceal it: "I hereby give up all pretence of offering some final explanation of why girls love horses with the abiding passion they do," she writes. "Instead, I invite you to the feast of uncertainty."

The feast turns out to be a banquet of canap?s. There is a chapter entirely devoted to snippets of horsey literature and another filled with vaguely aphoristic female musings on horses. Then there are passages of memoir and self-analysis, pages of indignant protest about animal cruelties, sharp descriptions of the rich humiliation of learning to ride late in life and keen observation of the ignoble uses to which people put horses: "One of New York's pre-eminent society designers," Holbrook Pierson notes, "has compiled a list of 14 essentials for a stylish life", on which "a horse" appears, along with "wonderful accessories" and "a good handbag".

There is, in addition, a sketchy modicum of highly Americanocentric history - no Empress Elisabeth of Austria, no Skittles, no Lucy Glitters - a brief bibliography and no index. A "volunteer researcher" is thanked in the acknowledgements.

So what does it amount to, this equine salmagundi? Holbrook Pierson is dismissive of magazine articles by "middle-aged writers" who have rediscovered their horsey roots. But isn't that, at greater length, more-or-less what she has produced? She is stronger on anecdote and interpretation than facts, which are sparingly deployed and not invariably reliable.

She is, for example, contemptuous about foxhunting, of which she cheerfully admits having no first-hand experience. Elsewhere she writes that the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry was "turned down for service in 1914", when her researcher could without difficulty have found out that, although initially rejected by the War Office, the Fany served at the front with distinction from 1914.

Holbrook Pierson might argue that to focus on this kind of detail is to misunderstand her book. And she might have a point. Dark Horses is capricious, opinionated, egocentric, sentimental and, in patches, brilliantly written. It is the kind of unclassifiable one-off which readers might as easily find intolerable as captivating. Slightly to my surprise, I find myself leaning towards the latter opinion - presumably because I, too, at the age of seven, knew that my destiny was to be a horse.