Black Beauty

The life of a horse told from a horse's point of view. The horse seemed to accept that his life was to be controlled by humans (he never longed for days of roaming the wild prairie, for example) but he always wished that his masters be kind. Some were. Some were not. Sewell saw lots of cruelty toward horses and part of her reason for writing the book (as it says in the forward to this book) was to show the torment that many horses faced.

I especially liked this version of the book, filled with illustrations of horse terms and places in London and depictions of complicated events in the story.

The first book I ever bought, from a garage sale for twenty-five cents!