Black Beauty's Family: Six Stories

Black Beauty's Family

by Josephine Pullein-Thompson, Diana Pullein-Thompson, Christine Pullein-Thompson

Compilation of Black Beauty's Clan (1975) and Black Beauty's Family (1978).

Genres: Horses, Animals

592 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

The Pullein-Thompson sisters — Josephine Pullein-Thompson MBE (3 April 1924-[1]), Diana Pullein-Thompson (born 1 October 1925) [2] and Christine Pullein-Thompson (1 October 1925–2 December 2005[2] — are British writers of several horse and pony books (mostly fictional) aimed at children and mostly popular with girls. They started at a very young age (initially writing collectively) and they were at their peak in the 1950s and 1960s, but their popularity has endured. They have written a collective autobiography Fair Girls and Grey Horses.

All 3 sisters have written at least 1 book under a different name; Josephine wrote 1 under the pseudonym of Josephine Mann, Diana 3 books under her married name of Diana Farr and Christine wrote 2 books under the name of Christine Keir.

Their mother, Joanna Cannan (1898–1961), sister of the poet May Cannan, wrote similar equestrian stories, but is better known for detective mysteries.

Reviews

[Daisy May Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black Beauty's Family is a compilaton of stories written by the estimable Pullein-Thompson sisters. They're all spin-offs from Black Beauty, and feature the life stories of other horses in his family tree. Each story centres on one horse from the start through to the end of their life (so far, so Black Beauty) and romp through a whole world of historical settings and contexts including smuggling, your-money-or-your-life-ing, circus performing, gangbusting, warring and so on and so forth with quite breathless abandon.

And they are outstanding.

But, before we go any further, I need to clarify what I mean by outstanding. I love the Pullein-Thompson sisters. I love their ferociously practical horse stories. These stories satiated a great need of mine during my childhood (a need, never quite satiated by standing at field gates and staring lovingly at blithely grazing Thelwell-alikes.) I loved, and I still love, how the Pullein-Thompson sisters were on their form, they were unbeatable. Now would also be an appropriate time to tell you that their joint autobiography Fair Girls and Grey Horses remains quite brilliant and well worth a read ("Are your girls normal?" somebody asks their mother. "I hope not" she replies.)

My love for the authors remains paramount, everlasting.

But oh, how these stories are like the Game of Thrones of the pony world. Everybody dies! Everybody gets broken knees! Tails get chopped off! Foals taken away! Ponies go the knackers yard! Bad men die "because of the drink" !

Here are some choice quotes for you:

"after my foal was taken away from me, the Master died. People said it was drink that killed him"

"It's about Daddy isn't it? He's dead"

"The rest of us put our heads down and grazed, each afraid of what the future might hold for us"

And the second volume is edited by a horse! I can't tell you how much I love this collection. I love the heartfelt earnestness of it, the terribly Sewellian overtones of it, and I love the hysterically tragic tone half of the stories reach and that the other half exceed.

Like I said, it's outstanding. Genuinely so.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edition presents stories about horses that are related to Black Beauty while capturing the tone and ideas being the original. One stand out story takes place during WW I.

[Chisa Puckett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a childhood favorite that I reread for shear love of it. Not the deepest of plot or conflicts at times, but I love the theme of, "Sometimes you come down in the world through no fault of your own, but sometimes you also rise through your best qualities."

[Rlouiseg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm finished. I love the presence the size of this book has. But I do find it a bit of a let down that this only counts as one book not six.
Each story was enjoyable and copied aspects of Black Beauty. It was written as closely as can be expected for different authors to Black Beauty.

[Generic Qazi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it before but liked it

[Jutta · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read the individual books in grade school. i remember finding them at the schaumburg library and be so happy to have more horse books to read. and then i read this volume again a few years ago.