You Have Fallen to the Bottum of My Estimation.

Joseph Bottum has dared to say that Half Magic, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and Misty of Chincoteague basically are mediocre, and people only bought them because there wasn’t anything better.

Look, critic creep. I was reading Lord of the Rings in 3rd grade, and I loved it, but I also recognized Marguerite Henry as the absolute pinnacle of the horse writing genre. Seward and Farley are decent reads, but there’s more real horse information and better pictures in Marguerite Henry. She was somewhat hampered by generally sticking to historical horse fiction or dramatizations of current horse events, but you also feel the ground more securely under your feet. You can’t visit Alec and the Black Stallion’s desert island. You can go visit Assateague and Chincoteague, or Siena, or the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. Her evocation of place and excellent illustrators virtually demand that you do go visit. And so her readers do.

As for her skills as a historical writer, I have never caught her out. Again, she is spot on, and you are there and then, living alongside the people and horses of her story. That’s not mediocre; and it’s a skill badly wanted in today’s historical fiction, in any segment of the market.

I don’t feel any need to defend Edward Eager; people keep reprinting him, don’t they? And I surely don’t feel any need to defend E.L. Konigsburg. But honestly, slurs against Marguerite Henry? Obviously this guy was reading the wrong books in third grade. (And no, I won’t give any passes on the ground that only girls like horses, because this is obviously untrue. It was my younger brother who made the pilgrimage to the Spanish Riding School, and he didn’t read The White Stallion of Lipizza until he was an adult.)