THE MAGNIFICENT BARB

I loved this -- but then I (and a lot of other people) am confessedly susceptible to the boy-and-horse school of story telling. There's something here of My Friend Flicka, something too of National Velvet, and just a hint of Donn Byrne in the Irish flavor (though the setting is Georgia, and the desolate, rundown plantation of the Fitzgeralds, where the Irish heart of old Sean seems intensified in his grandson, Kevin). To both Kevin and his sister, Cleena, horses held all their dreams, and they bid fair to remain dreams until Kevin saw, in a tinker caravan of Irish horse traders, the white-footed horse of his dream, the Barb. To be sure the Barb was pathetically thin, covered with galls and sores, but the look of the thoroughbred was there and Kevin knew it- and knew the horse for his own. How he got him, and brought him back to health, and how he had his day makes a story predictable in the pattern, but once again appealing to any reader who loves to read of horses and racing, and of the love of a boy for his horse. It is well done. There's a feel of the countryside- and an earthiness (and this not only in the scene in which the Barb is mated with the blind mare, Ziki). There's romance too.