A beautiful book on the deep connection forged between humans and animals. So emotional and thought provoking. A fascinating read.

A Massive Thank You to the Author, the Publisher and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read and review this book prior to its release date.

3.5 rating - this is about the year the author spent on Whalsay, one of the isles of Shetland. Wonderfully descriptive - the scenery, sea, traditions, flora/fauna, the lovely people she met who went out of their way to help. So much so that the reader could be there with her. A few snippets of how she came to be there as well. Plenty of animal husbandry but I would rather read more about the people and way of life on Shetland. Not keen either on the results of this and that study or quotes from various others. Plus I didn’t like the decision she made for Yoda but by then of course she would be somewhere else. Apart from the above points it was an enjoyable and informative book.

This book tells the story of Munro and her husband moving to Shetland as part of her PhD fieldwork, and alternated between two things for me - the stories about day to day life, the animals and people, were easy to read, down to earth and made me really feel like I was there (I certainly wanted to be). But then before long, a section of academic text would come along, pulling me out of the flow as she went into “lots of words to not really be clear” mode. Often when talking about relationships, place, belonging… so the accessible and interesting parts I liked, but the bits that felt like academese, were harder to follow for me personally.

I received a free ARC copy of this via NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review. Apologies for the delay in providing this.

Catherine Munro came to Shetland to write her PhD on the domestication of the Shetland pony. Coming from the city she found it quite strange how welcoming & inclusive the community on Whalsey were. She was given lots of help & encouragement & found people across the islands were eager to share the stories of their animals.

She writes beautifully about the wild landscapes through the seasons & the connections between all that live there. When she suffers a personal tragedy she finds the place becomes a place of healing as well.

Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this book

This is a book written from the heart. The author moved to Shetland discovering a rugged landscape, windswept through dark winters, but home to ponies, sheep, birds and the humans who had learned to share an ancient land with them.
There are some very poignant moments. She teaches a tiny lamb, Yoda, how to become a sheep and adopts Yukon, a Shetland pony, and her mother, Sugar. It is these animals who help her to cope with personal tragedy and understand the meaning of 'home'. The Islanders are welcoming and social able and the book records an unique way of life in a beautiful setting.

This book is a lovely, relaxing account of a year and more in the author's life, while she moved to Shetland to work on her PhD. She chose to study the island's ponies and how they fitted into the lives of islanders and nature of the island.

The early pages give us interesting facts - the Danish king pawned the Shetland and Orkney islands in 1496 to pay for his daughter's wedding dowry, and never managed to redeem them, which is why the islanders have a distinct heritage from the rest of Scotland. We also see some of the paperwork and frills of academia, grant applications, conditions to be met. And after all that, the author and her partner are on their own to move to a new community with a fluctuating power supply and occasional lack of transport to the mainland for weeks.

The personal domestic dramas may have been hard to write, but add to the authentic inner experience. As the author goes from being the awkward, welcomed stranger, to a member of the community trusted to rear a 'caddy' lamb and care for two ponies, she learns about the Shetland breed, the bloodlines of distinct types, the hardiness of the little survivors. A reader will quickly gain respect for these clever ponies. Equally, for the sheep which still form a livelihood for many islanders. Native breeds are being revitalised thanks to one or two careful breeders.

As much, we see the shores, the gannets and other wild birds, the wild sky, the constant struggle to grow potatoes, carrots and other homestead crops in cold, wet, salty ground. The Shetland black potato, the Shetland chicken and more, all adapted over many generations to thrive. We learn some local words and gain a glimpse of the archaeology. With the turning of the seasons the book reveals more details, packed with energy. Enjoy.

I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

A really lovely, educational look at Shetland living. Beautifully written. It was really interesting to read how “simple” living is really not simple at all, just a non-technological, grounded way of life. It was great to see how living in a more earthly way can heal personal wounds.

Catherine Munro, studying the concept of domestication for her Phd, moves to the Shetland Islands to research the connections between Shetland crofters & their ponies and sheep.

She discovers the unique relationships the islanders have with the animals & the importance of allowing them to grow into hardy, independent individuals, whilst still maintaining healthy bonds and respect for both animal and human.

At first moving from bustling city life, where everyone keeps to themselves, to the community focused Whalsay, (just off mainland Shetland) where every door is left unlocked for unannounced guests to visit at any time of day & the only way on or off the island is a questionably small car ferry, Munro starts her island journey feeling like she doesn't belong.

Whilst carrying out her research, connecting with neighbours, crofters & pony breeders and getting used to island life, she finds herself unwinding from the stress of chasing jobs and the trauma of a personal loss and begins to find peace in walking the island, reconnecting to the natural world and ultimately healing in nature - with the wind & waves as her medicine.

Learning to notice, to look up and see interactions between pairs of seabirds or a herd of sheep welcoming a newcomer, Munro learns the ability to read the nature and landscape around her - knowing the time of day by which birds are calling, knowing when a storm is due by where the ponies & sheep decide to take shelter, knowing where the biggest swarms of fish are by where the birds are circling the water.

This was a beautiful book, a love letter to Shetland and all the animals and people that live there. The Shetland Islands have now been added to my life list of places to visit.

I loved reading this book so much, that I had to buy the printed book for myself (which by the way is beautifully designed) so that I can read it whenever I feel like I need to mentallly revisit the Shetlands. And, oh, about the Shetland ponies: I learned so much about them but was also touched by the deep thoughts Catherine Munro has about how we influence their development by how we keep them. A much appreciated read.

We are almost half way through the year and this has definitely been one of the stand out reads for me so far in 2022. ‘The Ponies at the Edge of the World’ is an ethnography on Shetland’s Shetland Ponies. The book explores themes of belonging, roots and community, tradition, our relationship to the land (and sea) as well as our relationship to animals and their relationship to us.

I was really keen to read this as I like books about islands (probably because I live on an island). At the very beginning I was a bit sceptical as Munro talked about telling islanders that people on the mainland lock their doors (they would know this already I suspect) and there were plenty of cliches and touristy buzz words to do with islands that were all very chocolate boxy and romantic and not exactly real life. However, this very quickly changed and it was clear Munro’s attitude changed too as she left the mainland behind. We learn along with her about the ponies (also a few sheep and other animals), about their place and space on Shetland, the rhythms of life and as she discovers more it becomes apparent how much there is to learn rather than teach.

Her overall descriptions of the land, sea and wildlife were fantastic and really set an image in the readers eye. Her honesty about the situations she found herself also shone through well. What I particularly loved was how she managed to get the very difficult balance of combining her own personal story, anthropology theory and her research in this book and create something that was extremely readable and enjoyable. Her combining of these different elements is really what makes the book it is and paints the overall idea that everything is a lot more connected and in tune with each other than we might think if we only stop to observe this.

On a final anthropology point Munro brings out the islands themselves as an active participant in her research. This worked amazingly well and made me think a lot about how I view place and how so often we don’t take into account one of the biggest actors in our everyday lives. I also thought she drew some very interesting theories about balancing domesticity of animals and their wildness and the dangers of too much one way or another. The importance as well of animal and human reciprocity was really well argued. It reminded me in many ways of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work.

This is such a wonderful book and I will definitely be reading it again to see what I missed first time round.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I very much enjoyed reading this book. I have loved horses and ponies my whole life and as someone with a Scottish heritage, I was intrigued by this title. It is a lovely memoir of a very special place and a breed of pony that is unique to that area, for although many people, including me, learnt to ride on Shetland ponies in riding schools up and down the country, this book shows how they are best viewed in the context of their native island.
I enjoyed the descriptive passages in this book and I could almost feel the wind on my face and hear the sea raging in the storms that sweep across the Shetland Isles. It is a lovely book, nicely written and informative, which will teach you much more about this special breed of pony than you ever realized you wanted to know! And it's not just ponies either; otters, seals, birdlife and the adorable Yoda, are all visited and find their place in the pages of this book. A lovely memoir of a very magical place and the ponies who live there.

I don’t understand why not more people are talking about this book. It was published in May, so a recent release, yet I have seen no one talk about it.

Spoiler: I loved this.

I am always drawn to books set in Scotland and I am also drawn to books about how we engage with nature. I find island life fascinating, I love how the author tells her story of living this life at the end of the world. I found her take on the symbiotic relationship between human and animal fascinating.

A word of warning, the book features pregnancy loss, so if you are in a vulnerable space because of it, don’t read it. I know I could have not handled it 10 years ago.

But apart from this, I would highly recommend this if you love nature writing, memoirs, travelogue, it’s a blend of all three.

This book provides such a joy to the activity of immersive reading. Laden richly with imagery and perfect writing finesse, this book was a soothing balm such so that I completely got out of the world I live in and found myself in the world of this book. Amazing atmosphere, amazing description. Everything about this book is extraordinary.

I absolutely adored this book and will definitely be buying it as a hard copy. This book made me see Shetland ponies in a whole new light, as individuals with a history and a heritage, but more than that it is an account of a community and a way of life that is sadly lacking from much of Britain. Just Brilliant

Munro was living an almost hand-to-mouth existence in Scotland, in precarious employment but yearning for nature and open spaces, when she managed to secure a funded PhD place to study animal domestication, specifically of Shetland ponies, in the Shetland Isles. Off she and her husband go and settle in to a small house in a tiny community, digging in and working out how to exist there amongst the close-knit community and learning about the lives of the pony breeders and their charges.

We meet other wildlife as well as the ponies, including an orphaned lamb she rescues and the bird life of the islands. It’s all beautifully described, dialect words mixing with scientific ones naturally and authentically. The landscapes and weather are also superbly described and then we come to her fellow-islanders, respected and admired, their personalities drawn and their relationships with their animals carefully and considerately unpicked.

Munro’s central idea is that good, ideal domestication involves teaching the ponies how to interact positively with humans while retaining their own natural abilities and senses, letting them make their own decisions and learning from and with them. Shetlanders have strong ideas about what their animals are like, as a breed first, and then as individual studs, and Munro tries to describe how this happens and its deep value. Working with other people’s ponies, she gets an idea of how it works herself, too – the descriptions of her and others’ interactions with the ponies are moving and fascinating.

Going further, the landscape is seen as another actor in the interplay of humans, animals and the islands, and this is very plausible, each having an effect on the other two. Humans and animals are interwoven and back up each others’ attributes:

There’s no call to action here, but a description of what works and a worry about what might happen if things move otherwise. It’s good to see changes and adaptations in the way Shetland ponies are used – for example, their innate good relationship with children and vulnerable people makes them ideal therapeutic animals – which might secure their future.

A lovely book I’m very glad I read.

My full review (out 24 May) https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2022/05/24/book-review-catherine-munro-the-ponies-at-the-edge-of-the-world/

The Ponies at the Edge of the World is a celebration of the relationship between animals and humans. The word building was phenomenal in this book. Here I forgot about my own life and was immersed in the world created by the author. I would recommend this book.

The Ponies At The Edge Of The World is a gentle and beautiful read with gorgeous descriptives of the landscape of The Shetland Islands and the creatures that call it home. I enjoyed this memoir/ nature non-fiction book so much that I will be purchasing a copy for my self upon publication. Highly recommended. 5 stars.

This was an absolute joy to read. It follows the authors experience spending one year in the shetlands to study the ponies as part of a PHD. She paints such a vivid picture of the landscape and the wildlife, but in addition she explores the relationships on the island. The relationships between the human islanders, giving the reader a real sense of community life which exists there, as well as the relationship between the islanders and the animals. The small population results in deeper connections between all. I could sense how safe and loved the islanders would have felt. I loved hearing about what each season brought and how the islanders and the animals adapt. I'm sure it would have been difficult to leave this behind after a year.

A beautifully written book about the author's time in Shetland while writing a thesis on the island's ponies. From her first hesitant moments in her new home to learning all about the island, its inhabitants (both human and animal), and culture, it's a interesting insight to another place and world.

Her descriptions of the connection between the people, animals and nature are fascinating, showing how generations of sheep and ponies have learned how to survive the harsh conditions. Together with her sadness of losing a baby, there are some poignant moments.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the chance to read this incredible story. Highly recommend.