Black Beauty's Family

This volume is actually a combination of two books each containing three stories of about a hundred pages: Black Beauty's Clan, and Black Beauty's Family. Clan covers Black Ebony, who starts out as a hunter; Black Princess, who spent time as an officer's charger in the Great War (WWI); and Black Velvet who was a showjumper at a time when riding styles were changing. In Family, Nightshade goes from racehorse to highwayman's mount; Black Romany meets Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; and Blossom sufferers from the British disdain for piebald horses. As in Sewell's original Black Beauty, each horse moves though a variety of owners, good and bad, before reaching their happy ending, although friends along the way often fail to get their own (remember Ginger) The period details are marvelous, both the great - as where Ebony becomes a pit pony and later pulls bathing machines - and small - the fashion for children to roll hoops (a threat to horses if they roll underfoot) and the flagman leading the automobile, which later that year would be permitted to travel at FOURTEEN miles an hour instead of the then-legal FOUR, and no flagman would be required to warn horsemen of the car's approach. For children's books, I think these are very well written, although they do contain, as the original did, both death and violence (beating of horses and such), they also contain numerous examples of patience and love.