Read Aloud Thursday: The Silver Pony

I asked my daughters for their votes on the question of what their favorite read-alouds lately have been. Instantly, my third-grader replied, “The Book of Three. Because it’s so adventurous. But I feel a little sorry for Taran, because he’s always getting criticized by other people.” My kindergartener  said, “The Farm Team. And The Wolves Are Back.” The Farm Team is a tale of farm animals battling woodland animals in an all-out hockey match; I found it at the library and checked it out for my husband to read. As the girls have gotten older, he does less and less reading aloud, and I thought I could lure him in with guy-fare about hockey. It worked, and it’s a fun story. The Wolves Are Back is excellent, a picture book by Jean Craighead George that manages to convey a total, inter-related eco-system with simplicity and clarity. The illustrations by Wendell Minor are terrific too.

So, there’s the vote from the under-ten set. But I’m going to share my favorite read-aloud, one I didn’t know existed till I stumbled across it at the library this week: The Silver Pony, by Lynd Ward. We have The Biggest Bear, a relic from my childhood, and I’ve always been fascinated by the pictures. The details invite lingering, and somehow, the children’s faces are unexpectedly mature and expressive.

Now that I think about it, The Silver Pony shares some features with The Biggest Bear. Both feature young boys alone in a world of adults, trying to find their way. Both involve parents who are busy, serious people who work hard on their farms, but do make an effort to understand their children without babying them.

The difference is that The Silver Pony has no narrative at all. It’s told exclusively in pictures — 80 of them. They tell the story clearly and powerfully, in black and white. (Does this count as a read-aloud when there’s no reading of text involved?) It’s the tale of a lonely farm boy who dreams of a flying horse that takes him across the world in adventures that allow him to rescue and enrich others: a boy astride a floating house in a flooded village, a girl on the roof in a gray city keeping doves, an ice-fishing eskimo, a mountain shepherd boy. Without giving it away, I can say that ultimately it tells the tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun — but this Icarus survives, and must find a way to incorporate the dream with the daylight world, something his parents can help him with.

I liked the way the story affirms the imagination, but also makes it clear that life isn’t mended by escape. Imagination becomes an ally when it can be incorporated in waking life. I’ve been coming up against this subject in other sources lately, too; Who Am I This Time? by Jay Martin addresses it, and so does this thought-provoking two–part post by Jeanne Damoff on reading Perelandra. (Thanks, Barbara, for pointing me to it.) All of us need stories, all of us incorporate fictions. At what point do they help? At what point do they harm? This book figured into the question neatly and ingeniously.