The Finest Horse in Town - Softcover

Martin, Jacqueline Briggs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1930900821 ISBN 13: 9781930900820

Publisher: Purple House Press, 2016

Synopsis

Long before my mother was born, her aunts owned a store in a small village in Maine. They had a smart gray horse who pulled a shiny black buggy when they went out riding.
Prince was the finest horse in town. But no one remembers who took care of that beautiful animal while the aunts were working in their store: perhaps it was a sneaky trader who tried to steal him, perhaps it was a one-legged harmonica player who taught him to dance; perhaps it was two children who once saved Prince's life.
Jacqueline Briggs Martin, author of Caldecott winner Snowflake Bentley, really did have two great-aunts who owned a horse like Prince. In The Finest Horse in Town she recreates life in a small American town as it might have been at the turn of the 20th century. Susan Gaber's extraordinary watercolor paintings make the people and events in these three stories truly come alive.

About this title

About the Author:

Jacqueline Briggs Martin is the author of more than a dozen picture books for children, including SNOWFLAKE BENTLEY, winner of the 1999 Caldecott Medal. She grew up on a farm in Maine and heard stories of the two great-aunts featured in THE FINEST HORSE IN TOWN. She now lives in Iowa.

Susan Gaber is working on the illustrations for her nineteenth picture book for children. She has illustrated one other book written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, GOOD TIMES ON GRANDFATHER MOUNTAIN. She lives in Huntington, New York, with her husband and son.

From Publishers Weekly:

This tale of two sisters who run a dry-goods store in horse-and-buggy-era Maine is based on the long-lost family story of Martin's two great-aunts. The author of the Bizzy Bones books has spun a gossamer prose poem of unaffected sweetness, told as a series of vignettes that speculate on who might have tended the sisters' magnificent horse, Prince, while the two women were minding the store. Could it have been an unscrupulous horse trader, who almost duped the sisters out of their prize stallion? Or was it a one-legged logger, who taught Prince to dance to the strains of a harmonica? As Martin points out in her wistful refrain, "An old watchmaker told us / what he remembered. / And he was there." Remembered only in fragments, the story is essentially a slender one; but the beauty of its nostalgic, sing-song language and descriptions of village life more than compensate for its lack of substance. Gaber's ( The Woman Who Flummoxed the Fairies ) exquisite watercolors have the naive beauty of early American folk paintings. Ages 5-10.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Purple House Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1930900821
• ISBN 13: 9781930900820
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Gaber Susan