nerfherder86's review against another edition
4.0
Lovely modern day version of the archetypal Black Beauty story: horse narrates his life as he is sold to a series of owners and makes friends along the way, learns lessons. In this case, Macadoo is a Belgian draft horse, which is a different and interesting choice for a horse story. His mother imparts lessons to him about his breed, that they were important for humans, used in clearing land and doing all sorts of work; and that his job will always be to be strong and to heal people. Yes, the story is a little heartstring-pulling and dare I say schmaltzy, but really nice. Macadoo suffers the heartbreaking first separation from his mother, and then another separation years later from the boy he has grown to love; but he also learns to stay true to his calling and love every new child who comes to care for him or to ride him. And there's a lovely happy ending. I enjoyed learning a little more about vaulting (the sport of doing gymnastics tricks while on the back of a horse running around in a circle!) and therapeutic riding stables. I liked the mules he befriends, Job and Molly, too. My only quibble, and what kept me from giving it five stars, was that the horses were pretty much all-knowing; they all understood their humans perfectly, so they were always aware of what was going to happen to them. Mac's mom knew what an auction was and knew of the historic importance of Belgians; Mac learns to recognize the constellations in the night sky! As in, their real names, not some horse-idea of the constellations. But maybe I am being too cynical. I know as a 13-year old I would have eaten this book up, and I enjoyed being able to hand it to one of my library teens as her summer reading prize recently. I would read the other book in the series, Chancey of Maury River, too. I received an Early Reviewer advance reading copy of this book from LibraryThing in exchange for my (belated) review.
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