View source for Colin the Cart Horse by Gavin Puckett and Tor Freeman

{{infobox1
|title=Colin the Cart Horse
|author=Gavin Puckett and Tor Freeman
|reviewer=John Lloyd
|genre=Children's Rhymes and Verse
|summary=A superlative rhyme allows the author to get us right up close to a farting horse – with all the benefits and problems that suggests.
|rating=5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=80
|publisher=Faber and Faber
|date=September 2016
|isbn=9780571315437
|website=http://greenhouseliterary.com/index.php/authors/profile/puckett_g/
|video=
|cover=Puckett_Colin
|aznuk=0571315437
|aznus=0571315437
}}

Meet Colin.  He's a perfectly regular cart horse, carrying the crops, tools and children around the farm.  He's happy with a life of labour, resting after his shift is done about three every afternoon, and a life of hay – that is, however, until he wonders what his fellow farm animals are eating.  What could be the consequence of him trying out every other farm food on the market? 

I guess, in all honesty, I wouldn't give such a simple book five stars if it weren't done in rhyme.  This book is about a horse that gets bad wind, and causes a certain problem to trump all problems (pun intended).  And that's it.  There is a moral, yes, but on the whole the book is just about the build-up to when a certain bodily build-up lets rip – and nothing else. 

The very essence of the book, however, and the reason it's so loveable, is the verse – rhyming couplets that do here and there slip up on the beat (especially when it comes to dropping in ''biohazard stickers'') but generally makes for a perfect read-aloud volume.  I can easily imagine the parent sharing this jape with their young friend, pointing to the detail in the lovely illustrations, and taking their time over it – for me, my reading aloud of the whole thing left me with a bouncing, almost rapping rhythm.  Whatever speed and whatever approach you take, however, I can only see this book creating broad smiles, if not more. 

So yes, the jape there is a singular one, but it's a good one.  I could forgive the script for going into such detail about one bodily function, when it did it in couplets – any other form and it would seem gratuitous.  The fact the book was just about a bottom burp, when the [[Hendrix the Rocking Horse (Fables from the Stables 2) by Gavin Puckett and Tor Freeman|first I met in this series]] had a much richer world and story, was the slightest of problems, due to the qualities of the writing.  To repeat, the pictures are just as good – it's odd to see a pastel blue horse, but in the scheme of things here, which are either blue or orange and nothing else, it works, and Colin – all bug-eyed innocence – has so much character from the most simple of lines.  That's the pleasure, for once, of this book – its simplicity.  It doesn't aim for any further heights than the bottom, but it hits every target you'd want.  For the under-sevens this is lovely company, and I quite envy them it. 

I must thank the publisher for my review copy. 

More bouncy wordplay can be had for this audience with the likes of [[Oh, the Places You'll Go by Dr Seuss]]. 

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[[Category:Emerging Readers]]
[[Category:Gavin Puckett]]
[[Category:Tor Freeman]]