Running with the Horses

Lester (the Horse Crazy series) uses Vienna's famous Royal Academy of Dancing Horses as a background for a picture book drama that has the sweep of a novel. It's wartime, and troops are approaching. Stable master Viktor takes his daughter, Nina, into the mountains with four valuable stallions, as well as the groom, Karl, and the story's hero, Zelda, a broken-down cab horse Nina rescues at the last minute. Despite her lowly pedigree and rackety condition, Zelda saves the company twice from disaster, first leading them through the war-torn city, then keeping them from crossing an unsafe bridge. "She struck out with her forelegs, driving the stallions back off the bridge.... The middle of the bridge had been completely blown away, and a yawning hole gaped above the ravine." Lester draws humans and horses as doll-like figures in b&w, then places them against luxuriously colored, theatrically scaled backdrops, giving the illustrations the curious feel of a puppet performance. Lester's characters are strongly developed, and there's backstory and detail to spare (despite the journalistic tone, a note at the end explains that the episode is fiction). Ages 5up. (Feb.) Copyright 2010 Publishers Weekly Used with permission.

Gr 2-4—Inspired by the dramatic rescue of the Lipizzaner stallions from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna during World War II, this fictional story focuses on the 10-year-old daughter of the stable master at the Royal Academy of Dancing Horses in a "graceful old city." When war shutters the school and closes down the city, Nina and her father must escape with the last four stallions. Nina insists upon taking Zelda, an abandoned cab horse, a move that proves fortuitous when the canny old horse stops the party from plunging into a ravine from a broken bridge. Nina repays the horse'ss loyalty when Zelda drops from exhaustion in a snowstorm, and Nina refuses to leave her. At last, they reach her grandparents' house in the mountains. Lester's deceptively simple illustrations pair boldly colorful landscapes with black-and-white sketches of the characters in the foreground. Young horse lovers will thrill to this moving tale of loyalty and bravery.—Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, MD

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.