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Interesting... I'm honestly not quite sure what to think. It's a sequel of sorts to The Velveteen Rabbit, which I love. This one follows the adventures of the Skin Horse, after the Boy is grown up out of toys. The Skin Horse gets donated to the local hospital, where he becomes much loved by a sick little boy. The book is more like a really, really short novella than a picture book, even though it does have illustrations. It's quite a bit longer than your usual picture book. The pictures are dain...
I didn't care for it. It was depressing and not what I would read to a child. Also, the illustrations primitive and frankly, scary, particularly the faces. There were no expressions and every face was identical. It felt like looking at the Stepford Wives. I own this but am giving it away.
So yes, Margery Williams Bianco is of course most well and lastingly known for her classic 1922 picture book The Velveteen Rabbit (which is certainly very much a delightfully sweet story, but at least in my humble opinion also does contain some rather painful and even not so potentially wonderful elements, and this especially being the fact that the little boy seems to not even care all that much that the doctor has ordered his beloved velveteen rabbit and all of his toys and books to be burned
THE VALUE OF A TOY HORSEKnown for her insight into the feelings of toys (the velveteen rabbit, the skin horse, and the little wooden doll) Margery Williams Bianco wrote a sort of trilogy set in Long-Ago. Childhood was simpler, gentler and less complicated then—although privileged children did not see much of their parents, as they were generally in the capable hands of Nannies, Nurses and maids. But adults have always underestimated the power of a loving stuffed animal or doll for companionship
Companion, I'd say, to the incredibly more famous The Velveteen Rabbit Or, How Toys Become Real. This is more suitable to the Christmas season, whereas the other I always think of at Easter time. The illustrations are old-fashioned and sentimental but I love them and would have as a child. Compare to Andersen or Oscar Wilde, because of the deep spiritual metaphors... not likely to be understood by little children.Enjoyed on openlibrary. Easy to read in the one-hour sample loan.
The storyline is strikingly similar to that of The Velveteen Rabbit. Not as sweet or pure though but still worth reading.
A gem of a story, a follow up to The Velveteen Rabbit, in which we follow the Skin Horse to a children's hospital. As you can imagine, tears and uplift follow. Bianco's daughter illustrated this with charming if a touch stilted pictures. Pitch perfect.
This is a lovely story about a toy horse passed on to a children's hospital. The toy horse becomes friends with a little boy who is quite unwell and is there for some time. I found this very sad, if I had read this to my daughter when she was small we would have both been sobbing. A nurse puts his beloved horse in the bin as it is old and broken. My favourite toy when I was small was a toy horse that was put in the dustbin when it's leg broke which was heartbreaking. So very sad nobody in the st...