Beth's Fella

This is a delightful, charming memoir that Frances D. Strong has written. Beth’s Fells is a beautiful coming-of-age story that follows the life of a girl and her best friend, a beautiful horse. It details how the girl dealt with her life as her sight began to fade more and more as she reached adulthood and had a family.

This book is written in an easy-to-read style that lets you feel like you intimately know the family. The characters are well developed and pull you right into the action of the story. You come to love these people and cheer Beth on as she meets every challenge with strength and spirit. The illustrations by Kay Payne help to move the story along as you vision the different happenings in Beth’s life.

Beth’s Fella is a book young people will enjoy reading. It teaches about horses and those that love them. It also helps children learn how to deal with disabilities. Thank you, Ms. Strong for sharing your story with us. This book will be on many shelves as a keeper for a long time

10,000 White Horses - Book Review

10,000 White Horses is one of the cutest books I've read in a long time. Betsy B. Lee has captured the imagination within every young child. It is a beautiful story written in poetic verse.

Each of us who remembers our youth laying in the grass on long, lazy summer days looking at the clouds in the sky and finding animal, people, and flower clouds will be pleasantly surprised by Ms. Lee's ability to capture horses in the surf of the ocean as her "clouds."

The use of rhyming words allows the reader to see and feel the roar of the ocean as the pounding of the horses running in the surf. They are playfully running, dashing, crashing, skirting, flirting, proceeding, and receeding in constant motion with the sea. The young girl in the story hears the houses calling her to 'come play.' The symbolism and imagery both effectively pull the reader into the story from the start.

Ms. Lee uses descriptions of the sea such as 'sinking in the valley, restless mountains, and salty taste of the foam' to describe the sea as it rolls to shore.

This is a charming book that is disarmingly simple in its design yet complex in its thoughts, descriptions, and meanings. It is a book that children will delight in reading and adults will appreciate while sitting at the beach watching their 10,000 white horses cavort, play, and stampede to shore.

This is an unabashed call from Ms. Lee for people of all ages to use their imaginations to see life around them in a different perspective.