Changes

Yes, this is not the rocking horse you might remember from simpler, more serene times. This is full -on rock, and Hendrix knows it in his bones – the book even breaks off at one point to try and explain how he can play the thing. (No, it doesn't try and cover how he makes music when it's not plugged in to into an amp, or what humans etc can hear of his rehearsing, but we'll let that slide.)

What the book breaks off from is a brilliant set of rhyming couplets, and I finished it (which admittedly didn't take long) with a real warm-hearted feel. Yes , there are modern elements to the book, like the music, and the staid-seeming town mayoress getting up to unexpected things, but it really does have a quality you struggle to find in modern stories. The text is so quotable and so easy to read with timeless, unforced rhymes that it felt (with that added Faber and Faber cachet on the back cover) it was an old classic I'd somehow not heard of before. It didn't feel like a modern, current release, and one from a series of rhymed horse stories.

The natural feel to the whole proceedings only slipped up a couple of times, when I had at first misread the metre, and perhaps the moral is thumped on to the last page a little. The piece would be a doddle for the parent to read out at bedtime, for there is little in the way of dialogue so no silly voices needed, even if the verse does divert into being things like newspaper cuttings, and even the guitar's address label is incorporated into the rhyme. Should the older fan of the book return to it for themselves they will only find a handful of couplets on each page at most, and every spread with some illustration, which comes in just black and white and red, and is fine, even if it does struggle with cats' faces. What's more important is that that fan will be returning to a well-thumbed copy, if my response was anything to go by. I certainly caught an ageless quality to it all that meant I would be more than happy to start all over again, and the five-to-eight -year -old me would only have felt the same.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy. For more equine fun, have a look at [[Colin the Cart Horse by Gavin Puckett and Tor Freeman]].