The Blind Colt
by Glen Rounds; illus. by the author
Primary, Intermediate    Holiday    83 pp.    g
1/21    978-0-8234-4353-6    $17.99

“You can’t hurry a Glen Rounds book,” says artist Matt Myers, who opens this eightieth anniversary edition with a new appreciation of the author-illustrator. That’s certainly true of this quiet yet captivating story about the eventful first year of life for a wild mustang colt born blind in the Badlands of Montana. Rounds’s eloquent prose paints a vivid picture of life on the prairie (“The tumbleweeds to him were rattly rustlings and soft, ploppy swishes as they rolled and bounced”), and his rough pen-and-ink drawings complement the descriptions of the untamed environment, where the young colt must rely on senses other than sight to survive being hunted by wolves, changeable weather, separation from his mother and herd, and life on Uncle Torwal’s ranch as a saddle horse for ten-year-old Whitey (who also appeared in later books by Rounds). This edition concludes with some newly added facts and resources about mustangs.

From the March/April 2021 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.