Horse books for kids

Dear Annie,

Early chapter books: we've got such a good list of them.  It's a wonderful step in a child's reading progression.

I thought I'd take up another of our reader questions, this one from guest blogger Faith.  She asked four questions, but I'm just going to start with one.  For her four girls, she wants:

 Horse books that are somewhere between Marguerite Henry and easy readers.

Billy and Blaze, getting to know each other.

I've amassed a small pile, starting with picture books, then non-fiction, and finally some early chapter books.  We've posted on this blog 632 times, so sometimes when I start writing, I just check to see if we've mentioned a particular book before.  We do have an entry about the first picture books I was going to recommend to Faith: the Billy and Blaze books, written between 1936 and 1970.  Turns out that it was a guest blog, written by none other than our own Faith.  So we have an expert here.  I'll try to find some lesser-known books.

Next there's
Fritz and the Beautiful Horses by Jan Brett.  The people in a medieval city don't let Fritz within its walls  because they don't consider him beautiful enough.  Fritz seems little and Jan Brett-cute to me, buy hey, that's the story.  Fritz ends up saving a group of children and becoming the most popular horse in town.  Lots of nice horse pictures.

And on the more obscure end of the spectrum, Rosie's Magic Horse by the great Russell Hoban, illustrated by the equally great  Quentin Blake.  Rosie collects popsicle sticks.  When she adds a new one to her collection, it wants more from life:

"I could be something." [said the new stick]
"What?" said the old stick.
"Maybe a horse," said the new stick.
"In your dreams," said the old stick.
"We'd like to be a horse, too," said some of the other sticks.

They become a horse (named Stickerino), galloping into Rosie's dreams.  They all go off to find treasure to pay Rosie's parents' bills.  The mission is a success, and Rosie's dad wakes to find a chest of gold on the dining room table.  Lovely.

On to  chapter books, starting with
Horse Crazy  by Alison Lester, illustrated by Roland Harvey (in the tradition of Quentin Blake).  It's a four book early-chapter series from Australia.  Two girls have adventures with different horses in each book: they're very nicely done, with much attention to horse personalities.  The books have a website with profiles of each of the horses.   The first book, The Silver Horse Switch, tells the story of a dissatisfied domestic horse trading places with a brumby -- the Australian term for a wild horse.

Another series, Horse Diaries, is up to at least 11 books now.  They're illustrated chapter books by a variety of authors, each a diary from the point of view of a horse in a different historical period.  The first is set in Iceland in 1000 A.D.   There's Vermont in the 1850s,  Austria in 1938, Nevada 1950, etc.

And then there are True Horse Stories, a Canadian series of slightly fictionalized biographies of real horses by Judy Andrekson.  Most of them are horses who have been through some form of adversity but because of a strong relationship with a human being they go on to become skilled show horses.  In
Little Squire a very small horse and a kinda short guy both grow up separately in Ireland and come to America.  They find each other, establish a delightful man/horse friendship, and participate in jumping exhibitions around the country.  The horse has a very nice sense of humor.

I Wonder Why Horses Wear Shoes

Finishing off with two non-fiction books. There are number of this genre, at many reading levels.  They give a little history, some cautionary information about how much work goes into owning a horse, and lots of information about horses today. 
I Wonder Why Horses Wear Shoes is the reading level of a advanced early reader.  It answers 31 questions, including: Why do horses need grooming? How many kinds of horses are there? Whose horse had eight legs? (Eleanor and Isabel?) Which horses do cowhands ride?  Who sits in a sulky?  What is a chukka? I learned a few things reading it.

Eye Wonder Horses and Ponies

DK, a publisher that gets lots of mileage out of an excellent photo library, has a non-fiction series aimed at kids in the early grades called Eye Wonder.  The reading level is a little tougher than the I Wonder Why series, and the layout is excellent.  All their books open anywhere on a self-contained two-page spread  giving lots of information on whatever the topic is.  They've got one called Eye Wonder Horses and Ponies.

It does the usual topics, plus things like horse whispering, different styles of holding the reins, and feral horses -- it even devotes a paragraph to brumbies.

So there are a few horse books.  I hope some of these are new to you and the girls, Faith.  And when will they be getting horses of their own?

Love,

Deborah

New reader in the family

Dear Annie,

What a pleasure to have my sister doing a guest appearance!  Thank you Judy -- and Lorenz Graham was such a great choice.

Natasha

Our extended family is celebrating the birth two days ago of Natasha, a new cousin.  Her parents were Amazing Wedding #3 last summer, the last of the magical family gatherings of 2010.  I'm lining up some of my favorite good-for-infants books to give her when we all meet in Maine in August.

Natasha is my first cousin twice removed, your second cousin once removed, and Eleanor and Isabel's third cousin.  That sounds so distant -- yet we're all so close. 

In honor of Natasha's arrival, I wanted to mention a grown-up book I recently received from someone whose infant daughter I babysat when I was in college. 
Morning Song: Poems for New Parents was edited by Susan Todd, the mother of the now 40-something former baby, and Carol Purington.

Whenever someone I love has a baby, I think back to those first stunned, happy and intense weeks of parenthood.  All of a sudden, the world is divided into people who have children and those who do not.   Bob and I both felt we had become members of a not-so-secret society, all sharing this amazing reality.  The strength of that society's bonds was something we knew nothing about -- we had barely even known it existed.  Look! this person whom I've known for years is a parent.  She's been through the sea-change of becoming one, and I never realized it.  Morning Song is a welcome to the club.  Shakespeare, Yeats, Levertov, Atwood, Hughes (both Langston and Ted), Sappho, Billy Collins, Patti Smith, and many more are all here.  The poems all fit into sections, starting with love, conception, pregnancy and birth, then going through childhood and life.  They're all framed within a book about parenthood, but not every poem overtly addresses the parent/child relationship.  It's a collection to come back to as one's children grow.

Here's a celebratory selection, for Natasha:

Infant Joy

"I have no name: 

I am but two days old."

What shall I call thee?

"I happy am, 

Joy is my name."

Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy, but two days old.

Sweet Joy I call thee:

Thou dost smile,

I sing the while,

Sweet joy befall thee!

         -- William Blake

When Susan sent me the book, I sent back a suggestion for volume two -- if she ever does another.  It's a poem by an old friend, Charles Douthat.  "The Hold" is a little closer to my place on the parenting continuum, but those first days with a new baby never leave us.

Love,

Deborah

Beyond Words

Dear Annie,

A delightful Dutch book arrived from a publisher this week, reminding me just how varied wordless books can be. This one, called
The Surprise, by Sylvia van Ommen, follows a serious and industrious sheep while it takes a bath, rides a motorbike to go to the store, buys red dye, dyes its wool (while it’s still on), shears itself, etc., all the way through knitting a gift for a friend. It’s both whimsical and very clear and straightforward.

Peggy Rathmann is the queen of toddler/preschooler wordless books, with both
Good Night Gorilla, a hilarious and simple story about a mass zoo escape (the goal is to sleep in the zoo-keeper's house), and
10 Minutes till Bedtime about a boy getting ready for bed while a tour group of hamsters complicates the process. It’s all in the details, and there are lots of them. You can spend many minutes, if not hours, discovering all the things going on in each picture. And it has a number of references in it to Good Night Gorilla.

In Quentin Blake's
Clown, a group of toys is thrown out, and the clown doll sets out to find a new home for all of them. He has setbacks along the way, but ultimately finds a family in need of some cheering up, and they all end up happily together. Blake -- perhaps best-known for his illustrations of Roald Dahl books -- puts lots of emotion into this one.

David Wiesner does more complex, weirder and (sometimes) darker wordless books, but for an older child, they're quite wonderful. In
Tuesday, frogs float out of a swamp one evening on lily pads and have adventures in town, turning back into their land-based selves at the end of the evening. The pictures are amazing, bordering on the eerie, with details one can keep finding on re-readings. And his
Flotsam puts a washed-up camera at the feet of a boy exploring the beach. He develops the film in the camera, finding fantastic pictures of magical underwater worlds, and self-portraits of other children who have found the camera. At the end, he takes a picture of himself, and sends the camera back into the waves.

I'll end at the ocean still, on another younger book.
Wave, by Suzy Lee, shows a girl's day at the beach, with all the wonder and occasional overwhelmingness of the waves. Lovely.

So now that I've listed these, I'm wondering how you as the reader in the parent/child group, feel about wordless books. A welcome change? An extra task (now I've got to make up the story too...)? Something that can be read without you around? What do you think of them?

Love,

Deborah