Beauty's Son

by Anne H. Wood and Brian Keesling
(New York)

Beauty's Son is a retelling of Black Beauty, set in the modern horse world. It follows the eventful life of Beauty's Son, a handsome, intelligent black horse, as he has does everything from dressage to pulling a carriage in Central Park.

Along the way, he encounters good owners and bad. And he forms friendships with a variety of horses, and learns their own life stories. He also forms a special bond with a teenage girl, Nicki.

In Black Beauty's day, horses were primarily work animals. Today they are primarily pleasure animals. But their total dependency on humans for their well-being remains the same.

The story is narrated by the horse himself, and gives the reader some idea of what it is like to try to continue to please humans, who sometimes seem determined to make doing this as difficult as possible.

It leaves you amazed at the generally good spirit of horses, and relieved to see that there are some humans who also want to do the right thing.