MOON SHADOW

You recognize the Bad Guys in this stock Western because they wear black hats—oops, that’s wrong, it’s because they 1) speak rudely about Mustangs, spontaneously and at length; 2) thwart Our Heroine without any apparent motivation other than that they are Bad. The Good Guys always help Our Heroine, so much so that she never has to solve a problem on her own. The nice Heroine loves horses and longs for one of her own, and falls in love with a wild mare, but it dies, leaving a newborn foal, and the Heroine’s parents just don’t understand . . . (This is, of course, the secret desired autobiography many middle-school girls tell themselves at bedtime.) The Problems dry up and blow away like tumbleweeds the instant a Good Guy shows up. The characters are flat, the dialogue leaden, the plot—um, someone forgot to include one. The horses, on the other hand, are pretty good, and the opening scene of stallions fighting is the best four pages of the book. (Fiction. 10-13)