Darkmistress's Full Review: Walter Farley - The Black Stallion
When I was in about 5th grade my small town in Ohio acquired a branch of the county library courtesy of the local Rotary of which my father was a member. At this library was the full series of Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books. To say I devoured them would be an understatement. I read the entire series 3 times in the space of 2 years.
Years pass. I am wandering around a Half Price Books in Cleveland and I spot a table piled high with Black Stallion books I bought 7 of them just to have on my shelf in the hopes that I would soon have a horse crazy niece to share them with.
More years pass. I have 6 nephews (and where’s the justice in that?) I am attempting to watch the Kentucky Derby on ESPN (another story altogether.) I decide to take a bath before the race and I pick up The Black Stallion. I had just came off reading The Children’s War and I wasn’t up to taking chances with my reading enjoyment. I figured anything I read 3 times as a kid and adored couldn’t be that bad.
It was a mixed success.
According to the "about the author" page at the back of my book, Farley wrote The Black Stallion while in college in 1941. It shows. The style is very sensational and overblown. Part of this is the style of the time, part of it is bad writing. There are also 2 characters who drop in, do nothing, and disappear. They’re supposed to be Alec’s best friends, but they only make 2 appearances. If I had a friend in school who miraculously survived a shipwreck and returned him with the most impressive piece of horseflesh on the continent, you better bet I’d be there every day after school just watching them work. And the portrayal of the Italian huckster Tony might even be offensive in our modern politically correct society.
However, this doesn’t totally destroy the story. It’s still a love story between a boy and his horse, the most ordinary boy and the most extraordinary horse. They meet when the Black is loaded onto a ship that is carrying the boy to England. When the ship sinks off the coast of Portugal, the boy, Alec, grabs the horse’s lead line and the horse pulls him to land. While the boy and the horse are stranded together on the island, they form a bond. When they are rescued and return to Flushing, New York, that bond is enough to tame the stallion enough to allow the boy to ride him and then to ride him in a big match race against the 2 reigning thoroughbreds
The story is pretty pat if you’re an adult, but if you’re a kid, a horse crazy kid, it’s magic. The Alec gets to live two adventures of a lifetime in this one book. He’s shipwrecked and survives and he rides his horse in the big race. And due to progress, the world Alec lives in might as well be fantasy.
I also liked the relationship between Alec and his parents. (If you’ve seen the movie version, Alec has both parents here.) At first I was skeptical because Alec’s parents were so reasonable. "Oh son, I see you’ve brought home a horse. Of course you can keep him." "Oh son, you want to ride your horse in a major match race in Chicago. That’s just fine with me, don’t tell your mother." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Alec was treated as an adult because he acted like one and vice versa. In the book, Alec is returning from India where he was visiting a missionary uncle. He has to save himself after the ship he’s on sinks. Once home he has to do chores to earn money to keep his horse and he has to keep his grades up. There’s no negotiation here, it’s do it or lose the Black. So he does. I don’t know if this helped me in my interactions with my parents, but it can’t have hurt.
I don’t know that I’d recommend reading the book as an adult, but if you know a kid you need to try this one out on them. It’s exotic, exciting and doesn’t have a bad vocabulary. And it’s still a good trip down memory lane.
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First published in 1941, Walter Farley's best-selling novel for young readers is the triumphant tale of a boy and a wild horse. From Alec Ramsay and t...More at HotBookSale
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