The Black Stallion Legend

The Black Stallion is my favorite book! It's a story about a boy named Alec who is on a ship with a Wild Stallion. Their ship sinks and most everybody dies. Alec lats the Black free from it's cage on the ship so it can fight for life. Alec gets knocked overbourd when the ship is sinking. When he see's something gliding through the water next to him. Blindly he grabbes at it. It's the Black's halter! The Black Stallion is a thrilling and exciting book. One of the great Walter Farley books worth buying! Katy Ann.

The Black Stallion is a wonderful story about a teenage boy's relationship with a wild Arabian stallion who rescues him from drowning after a shipwreck. The two are isolated on an island for many weeks and learn to respect and care for each other. Alec tames the Black with love, and rides him all over the island. The book progresses through their rescue and trip home, where Alec boards the Black with his neighbor Henry, a retired race horse trainer. Alec soon discovers that racing the Black professionally is not as easy a galloping wildly across the island, but he's determined to try, and with Henry's help, brings the Black to a stunning victory against the fastest horses in the country!It's a shame that Random House has let all but 4 books in this series go out of print. Also, a succession of cover illustration changes was not a good idea either. The original paperback illustrations by artist Ruth Sanderson were INCREDIBLE! I can remember reading the books when I was about 8, and drinking in the lavish, dangerous looking images of the Black and the other horses. The re-done illustrations are clumsy, and do not portray Walter Farley's legendary horses as he intended them, i.e. wild and dangerous! Perhaps someone at Random House will get a clue, and re-issue the entire series with the original covers! Please!

Others have expressed these thoughts but I must chime in and support them. This is a great book for children. I first read it when I was nine and my sister and I re-read the entire series many times. There are women working the backstretch on race tracks who say that it all started with Walter Farley.The movie, though gorgeous to look at, is an insipid version of the story--minus the sexiness, danger, and complexity of relationships. (In the movie the director neatly kills off the father and makes the hero much younger to remove all that troubling complexity!) Many years ago in Seattle I attended a screening of this film and had an opportunity to politely explain my feelings to the director, Francis Ford Coppola. Basically he said something like getting rid of all the talking made the film more mythic. Oh well: to some extent I can see his point. Films are difficult to make and have their own requirements--but why don't they make up their own stories instead of taking so much license with good books? As at least one reader's review has commented, the decision to redo the illustrations for the early Black Stallion books was misguided. The originals have a wildness and excitement to them that later editions lost. If your child really likes these books, finding an old edition with those drawings would be a wonderful gift. Like all good books for children, The Black Stallion contains undercurrents of troubling feeling and presents strategies for working those out, or at least living with them. Don't we all have something wild living in our back yard that occasionally jumps the fence? This notion was exciting to me as an adventurous little girl --and as a nearly 50-year-old who is still crazy for horses, it still works for me.--A reader and parent from Olympia, Washington

Farley took a chance with this book and, unlike others, it rocked my world. It took me a couple tries to finally understand what happened at the end of the book, and that is the only detraction I have! Alec's pain is raw and movingly depicted in this book. I didn't think Walter Farley had that kind of cathartic writing ability at all, but he really pulled it off. The reader can follow poor Alec through the pain of loss and then come to terms with it as he does. Farley did it! This book is a must read if you want to end the series right. Read it.

Walter Farley started writing the story which became "The Black Stallion" while he was still in high school. I think I was eight or nine years old when I first read it. I still read the series from time to time, and time has only made me appreciate Farley's fine writing skills all the more. Especially the final chapter about the match race between Sun Raider, Cyclone, and the Black - I can actually HEAR the track announcer's "It's the mystery horse!" in my mind. Mr. Farley had the unique ability to express emotions through the written word - it still gives me tingles.Only one beef I have - why, oh why, did they decide to re-do the illustrations? I still have my dogeared Scholastic Books paperback with the original illustrations. The original illustrator made the Black truly look like "the wildest of all wild creatures".This book should be in every child's library!