The 'Jill' series were always my favourite pony books and, going back to them now, I can see why: although they're as pony-centric as you might imagine, the human characters don't lose out to it, and they have exactly the kind of snarky humour that I find irresistible. This is a reprint edition, and I was rather miffed to find some editorial amendments – currency has been changed from £sd to decimal, for example, and there's a reference to setting a particularly obnoxious child rider on the Viet Cong, which I would guess was originally the Mau Mau – but, on the whole, I should be grateful to get an edition in which the pony Black Boy's name had not been PCed out – although I think, at this point, I was already too late to miss the excision of any reference to smoking. I also made sure not to buy the edition where some particularly dirty-minded person at the publishing house decided that the title was Too Shocking and amended it to 'Jill and the Runaway'. ( )