My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara

First published: 1941

Type of work: Adventure tale

Themes: Animals, coming-of-age, family, friendship, and nature

Time of work: The period following World War I

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Goose Bar Ranch, Wyoming

Principal Characters:

• Kenneth (Ken) Mclaughlin, a ten-year-old whose all-engulfing dream is to have his own horse
• Rob McLaughlin, his father, who deems Ken undeserving of a horse
• Nell McLaughlin, his mother, who understands Ken’s possessive longing for a horse of his own
• Howard McLaughlin, his brother, who does everything better and smarter than Ken and whom Rob McLaughlin expects Ken to emulate
• Flicka, the filly Ken chooses

The Story

My Friend Flicka is a coming-of-age story about a boy, Kenneth (Ken) McLaughlin, who learns to take responsibility through caring for a horse. Young Ken is allowed to ride any horse on his father’s ranch, but he really wants a horse of his own. He loses himself in daydreams, ignoring responsibility and evoking great consternation and anger in his father, Rob McLaughlin.

Report cards arrive in the mail from the McLaughlin boys’ boarding school in Laramie. Against his brother Howard’s near-perfect marks, Ken’s are poor: He has received a forty in history, a seventeen in mathematics, and, worst of all, a zero in English. Not surprisingly, a letter enclosed from the headmaster informs Rob that Ken has not been promoted—not because of a lack of ability but because of “carelessness and inattention.” Howard—older, smarter, and ambitious—receives the approval of his high-achieving father, who is a West Point graduate. Ken, typically, is out of favor, and his chance of getting a horse that he so deeply wants seems impossible.

Rob, however, is shocked by his wife Nell’s statement that Ken will never earn a horse because “he’s so far behind now, it’s hopeless.” Finally, when Ken loses a saddle blanket and breaks a bridle, Rob knows no other way to teach his younger son responsibility than to grant Ken’s wish. Ken chooses a yearling filly, Flicka, as his charge. Rob is angered by this particular choice: Flicka is the product of a savage cross of bloodlines, and he had hoped that his son would make a wiser choice.

Flicka is, indeed, not Ken’s dream horse, although he does love her. She is petrified by fear when encountering humans, and on one occasion she leaps a high barbed-wire fence and injures herself severely. Flicka allows no one near her, shunning Ken’s attempts to win her trust. Weakened by the wire cuts, however, Flicka finally accepts the oats that Ken offers and eventually hobbles to the pasture gate to await his visits. A strong bond develops between the two.

When infections from the closed wounds spread throughout Flicka’s body, the horse becomes dangerously ill. No cure works, not even the serum administered by the veterinarian. Rob finally decides that the horse must be shot, and Ken, heartbroken, steals down to the pasture to spend time with his filly. He finds the horse fallen in the stream, having stumbled from her weakness. Ken, unable to pull her out, sits in the water and holds her. The cold water cleanses the filly’s wounds, however, driving the fever from her body. In the morning, her health has improved— while Ken’s has deteriorated: He has contracted pneumonia.

Both boy and horse finally recover. Ken is accepted into the next grade at his school, by virtue of an essay he has written to the headmaster during the summer. Clearly, the special relationship between the boy and the filly has helped both to mature.

Context

My Friend Flicka is Mary O’Hara’s most famous work. The author’s brief stay in Wyoming in the early 1940’s had an immense impact on her writing; this state was the country in which O’Hara found, in her later life, “such emptiness, such solitude, such vastness.” Her story of a young boy and his horse is one of the very first novels involving such a relationship, preceded by few similar works and equaled by none. Some million copies of the novel have sold, and it has been translated into most major languages. With the success of My Friend Flicka, two sequels set in the McLaughlins’ ranch in Wyoming followed: Thunderhead (1943) and The Green Grass of Wyoming (1946). This trilogy, O’Hara observes, “opened the door for the spate of horse books which has poured out upon the public ever since.”

Themes involving the relationship between a child and a horse have since been widely popular, and many famous works have been published in the wake of My Friend Flicka. Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion (1941), published the same year as O’Hara’s classic, tells of a wild horse tamed only through the love of a young boy. Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague (1946) involves the desire of two youngsters to buy one special filly of their own. Stuart Cloete’s short story “Throw Your Heart Over” (1960) is the tale of a crippled girl whose recovery is made possible through the special bond between her and an old broken-down mare. A Morgan for Melinda (1980), by Doris Gates, highlights a relationship between a girl afraid of horses and the stallion she must learn to ride.

O’Hara’s ability to make the reader able to “smell the grass and feel the coolness of the [Wyoming] wind” has combined with the very real and dynamic characters of Ken and Flicka to create a story loved not only by those interested in horses but by all. The story is a fresh look at the maturation of a young boy who, in one summer, because of one special horse, learns the rewards of a responsibility deepened with love. My Friend Flicka is a tale written with a rich and warm honesty that has contributed to the explosion of a literary genre and continues to be loved by youngsters of every generation.