For the Child Who Loves Horses

Horses fill the margins of the homework, and the backyard is for galloping. Pick by your child's age and how much their heart can carry. It runs from a picture book a four-year-old will sit through to a Victorian novel a twelve-year-old reads alone, with a horse front and center almost the whole way.

Reach for the one that fits. For the smallest horse-lover there's Paul Goble's glowing picture book and the gentle Bramble and Maggie, a real horse and a real girl learning to trust each other. For the child who wants the actual animal there are two fact books, a photo-filled reader and the big DK browse-anywhere reference. Misty is the warm pony story a lot of parents remember. Then two are held apart for older readers: Black Beauty, a horse telling the hard truth of its own life, and Pony, which is really a frontier ghost story with a horse as the way in. Match by age and by stomach rather than by reading level alone.