National Velvet is about a girl and her horse, that's true enough. The rural way of life, in which most dogs aren't pets, your pony is your means of transportation instead of your hobby, and the village is a long walk away- all pretty much gone. How many people even know what butchering is, much less what it would be like to live in front of a kill yard? There's nowhere I know that would give kids candy bars on credit with the kids carefully tallying up what they owe for when they have the money. While I was reading the book, I was very aware that I was being given a slice of life for a way that people don't live anymore. It was written in 1935, so of course it's aged. How do you rate a book like this? It's marketed as a children's book, but when I read it as a pre-teen there's no way I got all the subtleties that the author works into her themes.
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