Horse (review)

A lovely palomino mare, the mount of a young girl, gives birth in spring to a sweet, gangly foal. As the year passes, the colt gets bigger and stronger, and next spring the girl is starting to train him and to dream about their future adventures together. There's essentially no story here; the text, a British import retaining the technical terms of its homeland, is mostly a series of pleasant moments. Its very compactness, though, will help make it accessible to kids just heading out of the "Horsey!" stage, infatuated with velvety muzzles and foals and not yet insistent on verisimilitude in their pretend horse ownership. The real magnetism here lies in Rinaldi's oil paintings: oversized pages and glamorized photorealism offer real competition to the pleasures of being there. While the draftsmanship is occasionally a little strained, the up-close details of silky manes and limpid eyes will, as undoubtedly intended, make horse-mad youngsters sigh in sheer yearning, and the idyllic visions of a verdant meadow laden with buttercups or bedecked with butterflies, depending on the season, only add to the desirability of the fantasy. This lacks the compelling story of Doherty's Snowy (BCCB 4/93) or other early horse books, but youngsters already heading down the conceptual bridle path will find plenty of fodder for dreams here.