About the author
Janni Lee Simner is best known for her fantasy novels, and for Bones of Faerie, set in a post-Apocalyptic world after the war between human and Faerie has devastated the world, in particular. She has also written a series of three horse books. These are a mix of conventional horse and fantasy; Star is a ghost horse whom only Callie can see, but there is some real horse action in some of the stories too.
Jannie Lee Simner described herself as “a pretty cowardly kid,” but with the help of Girl Scouts, she became braver, eventually reaching such a pitch she managed to send the stories she’d worked on out to publishers. She is a prolific writer of short stories, mostly in the fantasy genre, and still works with Girl Scouts.
Finding the books
Easily findable in the USA. None of the books were published in the UK.
Links and sources
Janni Lee Simner’s website
The series
Phantom Rider series
Ghost Horse
The Haunted Trail
Ghost Vision
Bibliography (horse books only)
Ghost Horse
Scholastic, 1996
The Haunted Trail
Scholastic, 1996, 139 pp
Callie Fern is going to go on her first trail ride, now Star has rejoined her owner in the ghost world. Disaster intervenes though, and Callie and her sister are left stranded in the mountains with a huge storm on the way.
Ghost Vision
Scholastic, 1996, 137 pp
Callie still rides Star at night, despite the increasing pressures of homework and school. However, Star is becoming weak. When Callie tries to help her, she finds she herself is starting to become almost ghostlike as Star is becoming more corporeal.
Short Stories
Tearing Down the Unicorns
(in A Glory of Unicorns, ed Bruce Colville, Scholastic)