Moeri, Louise

About the author

Louise Moeri (b.1924) was born in Oregon, and grew up during the Great Depression. When she was two, the family moved back to the family ranch, though this was now dry and unproductive, not the green place her grandfather had first homesteaded. When her father didn’t need the horse, she and her brother rode to school; otherwise they walked several miles each way. When Louise was ten, the government declared the land sub-marginal, purchased the ranch, and returned it to open rangeland. The family then ricocheted from one ranch to another.

Louise went to the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with a liberal arts degree which didn’t fit her for anything much. She worked at a succession of jobs until she managed to find one in a library. There she met her first ever children’s books, and decided to try writing them. After all, she thought, some of them only needed 100 words. Unfortunately, they had to be the right 100 words. However, she persevered, and wrote several gritty and realistic stories during the 1970s. Solveig, her heroine in A Horse for XYZ, is certainly gritty; not the most immediately attractive character, but her story sucks you in and Louise Moeri makes you care what happens to her.

Literary fashions change, and Louise Moeri does not write fantasy, so she started to write gritty books for adults instead.

Finding the books
Both books are easy to find, and not generally expensive. Neither was published in the UK.

Links and sources
Louise Moeri on HarperCollins
Terri A. Wear: Horse Stories, an Annotated Bibliography, Scarecrow Press, 1987
A review of XYZ on the Pony Book Chronicles