Newbery Review: Smoky the Cowhorse

After ten years of working on the goal on and off, I finished reading all the Newbery Award Winning books last week. It was often harder than I thought, but I know that keeping it up will be a pleasure as the books that win Newbery Awards are always excellent. I will have a post about my experience soon, but here is a brief review of my final hurdle, Smoky the Cowhorse by Will James.

I know exactly why Smoky the Cowhorse won the Newbery Award in 1927. I’m sure little boys in the 1920s loved reading about a horse born wild on the range, lovingly trained by cowboy Clint to be a cowhorse, and waited breathless as Smoky went from being stolen to the rodeo circuit to eventually even being sold to the chicken feed man. (Don’t worry, Smoky is spared and though he goes through some hard years, he is eventually reunited with Clint and lives out his old age wild and free on the range again.)

But besides the fact that this is a horse book and I’ve never loved horse books, the language made this extremely difficult for me to wade through. For one thing, when Smoky is taken, the horse thief is a “half-breed” and is most often referred to as only “the breed.” Smoky gets far more respect than the man. I’m sure publishers didn’t think twice about this 80+ years ago, but it made this modern reader quite uncomfortable.

Even without some racially offensive language, the entire book offended my English major/grammar geek self. I know that it was written to sound like the slow drawl of a western cowboy, but it hurt my ears and my eyes. Here’s a small sample:

“Smoky had inherited that same instinct of his mammy’s, but on that quiet spring morning he wasn’t at all worried about enemies, his mammy was there, and besides he had a hard job ahead that was taking all of his mind to figger out, that was to stand on them long things which was fastened to his body and which kept a spraddling out in all directions.”

Two of the worst offenses were that, 1) he spelled “crethures” when all I could figure he meant was “creatures” (how would you even pronounce that?) and, 2) his favorite phrase was “would of.” This is a common mistake in written English because we pronounce “of” with a “V” sound. It is “would have.” It was consistently “would of” in the book, so it was a conscious choice. But I must ask the long-dead editor: why not “would’ve” or even “woulda”?

Oh well, it’s over. I can return the offending book to the library and look forward to books that better suit my tastes.