Horse Tales

This is a handsomely produced gift book for pony and horse lovers, adorned with fine full colour plates. Its selection includes folk and fairy tale material, a touch of social commentary in extracts from Black Beauty and War Horse, and a number of stories that focus on a child’s longing for a horse or the unique relationship established between riders, particularly children, and their mounts. There are a number of expected authors represented, including June Crebbin herself, Wendy Douthwaite, Alison Lester, Marguerite Henry and K M Peyton, and it is, perhaps, the more unexpected inclusions, like Lincoln Steffens and Peter Dickinson, that may offer the most interesting reading for someone who is not already besotted with horses. Both these tales are complete in themselves and it is possible that that one or two of the extracts from full length novels do not have enough space to introduce themselves adequately. You can see other ways that this could have been done, but this is a book that, in words and pictures, explicitly addresses those readers who have, like its author, a dream ‘of a cottage in the country, with my black pony quietly grazing in a field blazing with buttercups’.