THE HAPPY HORSE
By
On Fregosi's eclectic faux-naive pages a stylized Greco-Cretan horse demonstrates his Joie de vivre in a Sixties-hippie setting that is decorated with some vaguely Amerindian designs and colored all jaunty for the kindergarten wall During a romping, rhyming day, the happy horse sings a wake-up song, jumps and splashes and kicks up his heels, and caps the day with a rhyme that is repeated fore and aft in the endpapers: ""The leaves are red,/The apples are red./A horse shakes them down/ With a toss of his head."" Sunny, with a harvest of vegetation and a skyful of flying, floating, or gliding objects; but the spontaneity feels forced.