Black Beauty (Scholastic Classics)

Black Beauty is a young black colt and loves roaming Farmer Gray’s fields with his mother. As Black Beauty grows into a handsome stallion, he is trained into the use of a saddle and whip and sold to Squire Gordon of Birtwick Hall. Here, he makes many friends including the angry Ginger, the well-meaning Merrylegs and the elderly Sir Oliver, as well as stablehands James and John. When Squire Gordon has to move abroad to improve his wife’s ill health, Black Beauty is sold again to Earlshall Park. So begins a hard and unsettled life for Black Beauty who is always at the whim of his human owners. Often he is whipped and made to wear blinkers or the bearing rein, at other times he must work as a cab horse on the busy London streets. Will Black Beauty ever be able to roam the fields again as he did in his childhood? What has become of his friends Ginger and Merrylegs? Rediscover Anna Sewell’s moving tale of the hardships of being an animal in a human world with Scholastic’s classic edition.A horse is a horse of course unless of course the horse is Black Beauty. Animal-loving children have been devoted to Black Beauty throughout this century, and no doubt will continue through the next. Although Anna Sewell’s classic paints a clear picture of turn-of-the-century London, its message is universal and timeless: animals will serve humans well if they are treated with consideration and kindness.

Black Beauty tells the story of the horse’s own long and varied life, from a well-born colt in a pleasant meadow to an elegant carriage horse for a gentleman to a painfully overworked cab horse. Throughout, Sewell rails–in a gentle, 19th-century way–against animal maltreatment. Young readers will follow Black Beauty’s fortunes, good and bad, with gentle masters as well as cruel. Children can easily make the leap from horse-human relationships to human-human relationships, and begin to understand how their own consideration of others may be a benefit to all. (Ages 9 to 12)