THE MARVELOUS MONGOLIAN

This doesn't seem to work as well as last year's Sporting Proposition even if it's roughly the same formula fattened and doubled to include a boy and a girl and a pony and a horse -- a Mongolian, using a correspondence (""Dear English friend Kitty Jamieson"" from her ""new friend Baryut Mingha"") to tell about the captured wild mountain stallion sent to Wales with Kitty and her grandfather and her Shetland pony Peep. But Tachi, the Mongolian, and Peep both disappear and as the letters continue they chart the attempt to find them from France to Hungary to the Ukraine (where they fail to catch them via net dropped from a helicopter) until Tachi makes it all the way back to his native land. An almost tutored simplicity -- and no more than first oats -- largely for an audience as young as Kitty and Baryut.