Review of ​The Pearl and The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

​The Pearl and The Red Pony by John Steinbeck are two novellas focusing on the lives of people in California. The Pearl is about an indigenous couple whose child is stung by a scorpion, so they request the aid of a doctor. However, the doctor only treats patients who can pay, and the family, Kino and Juana, are poor. To see if they can find money to pay, they go out into the bay and dive for pearls where Kino discovers one the size of an egg. From then on, people of their village and the town try to steal the pearl or kill them. The doctor returns to help the sick baby, but is really out to get the pearl. Kino first tries to sell it to the pearl buyers in the town, but they give him a terribly low price, so he decides to go to a city in the north to sell it. Before they go, their home is burned down, and they must evade trackers until they reach a cliff. Kino understands they will soon find him and Juana, so Kino decides to kill the trackers at night. Kino crawls down from the cliff, and attacks the men, but a rifle goes off in the direction of the cliff. Once Kino kills the three trackers, he returns to Juana and their hidden child, but find that the child has been shot in the head. Kino and Juana return to their village where they lost their home, boat, and now child. They arrive to the shore and, knowing that the pearl has only brought with it evil, throw it back into the water.
 
The Red Pony is about a boy, Jody, who lives with his family on a ranch. One day, his father gets him a pony for him to take care of. However, when it rains, the pony comes down with an illness it can never recover from. All the while, the ranch hand, Billy, reassures Jody the pony will survive. Following this, an old man arrives to their ranch claiming he lived there before and plans to stay there. Jody’s father, Carl, is reluctant to house the man and tells him he can only stay the night. The next morning, one of their oldest horses is gone with the man. After seeing how well Jody treated the pony in its illness, Carl decides to breed one of their horses and give the colt to Jody to care for. Jody takes a female horse to another ranch where it’s breed, and Jody impatiently waits for the colt to be born. One morning, Billy wakes up Jody telling him the horse is about to give birth. Though, as Billy is prepping, he realizes the colt is turned the wrong way around, and must kill the mother horse and cut open its belly to allow the colt to survive. Finally, later on at the ranch, Jody’s mother gets a letter saying their grandfather plans to arrive. Jody is excited while Carl dislikes the grandfather’s stories because he’s told them many times before. Thus, Carl believes the old man is living in the past. In the end, the grandfather explains that the stories weren’t exactly what he wanted to convey, but rather the feeling of being a leader of a strong team.
 
These two stories were striking in the way they rendered setting, dialogue, and people with precision. I was drawn into the tragedies of both stories, and liked the way The Pearl zoomed out in time in the end to frame the story as a legend. The Red Pony also does something interesting in that each section felt like its own small story, and I wasn’t sure if some of the characters/ideas would come back. What happened to the old man who stole the horse and rode into the ridge above the ranch? Does the colt survive after its birth, and why doesn’t it pop up later on? There are a lot of things left unresolved, but I felt that it worked. I really enjoyed this read although both stories described loss after loss without much reprieve.
 
Final Rating: 4/5