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I think this passage captures the tone of Peyton's writing well:

Mr. McNair was smiling, but she didn't notice. She was beginning to think that Mr. McNair's ponies might cost more than forty pounds. Everything was so new and expensive, from Mr. McNair's trousers to the first shining bolt that he was pulling back on stall 12. There was no rust at Mr. McNair's, no chipped paint, no dirty straw blowing in the breeze. Only perfection. Ruth remembered Peter holding Toadhill Flax on a quivering rein while he dropped the string. Perfection. "This isn't my sort of place," Ruth thought, and in her imagination she saw a stable yard, slightly untidy, with dipping tiled roofs and pigeons, and stables converted from an old carriage house, with cobbles, and cats, and a faithful head looking over the half-door ... the sort in books. She swallowed desperately.

Peyton's sympathetic but honest account of Ruth as she muddles along on nothing but heart and a few dog-eared horse books to train a pony she can barely manage is a wonderful antidote to all those sappy "girl meets pony of her dreams and win blue ribbons everywhere and everyone lives happily ever after" stories.