Husband-and-wife storytellers team up to present five short stories of mythical horses from storytelling traditions around the world: An Arabian horse tale from the 14th century; the story of Snail, a mustang race horse from the American west; Humpy, a magical Mongolian pony; Timor, Paul Gauguin’s ghost horse; and Kourkig, an Armenian Karabair. The stories are well researched, with notes on their sources, but not well told. The authors’ inconsistent efforts to match the voice of each story with its origin results in sentences that sound like bad parodies: “Okey-dokey, Doc, you hold Snail’s halter, but you better let go kind of quicklike when I git to that big fallen tree over yonder”—and all of the stories are too long. They seem to be primarily stories of people who rode horses, rather than stories about the horses themselves; the horses stay on the outside, not the center. Uneven, but passable. (Fiction. 9-12)
