Title: The Snake Who Wanted to be a Horse
Author: Valerie Harmon
Illustrator: Carol Stevens
Publisher: Wantstobe.com
The Snake who wanted to be a Horse by Valerie Harmon is a sweet and unlikely story
about a snake whose belly is sore from all the crawling that he has to do. He
sees a horse, an animal whose stomach is so high above the ground that it never
touches the ground. What’s more, Horse has such long legs that he doesn’t need
to crawl either.
And so, Snake decides that he wants to be a horse.
He asks Horse for advice. Horse first tells him to eat grass
for a week, and then when that fails, to neigh and whinny all through the day
for a week. Both courses of action produce hilarious results.
La Niña and El Niño, who listened eagerly as I read this
book aloud, laughed the loudest when these parts were read.
And then Horse recommends that Snake move from one place to
another by lifting his body off the ground. You can imagine the challenge inherent
in that advice for someone like Snake.
But Snake is determined to become a Horse, and will put
himself through any amount of pain.
The illustrations by Carol Stevens are adorable and they give a
good push to the imagination.
El Niño wanted to know why Snake wanted to be a Horse and
nothing else. I had to remind him that it was a Horse that he had seen when he was dissatisfied with his own lot. From there,
he wondered briefly what would have happened if he had seen an elephant, for
example, or a peacock. He also thought a tiger would have been far better.
In the end, I wondered if Snake’s
goal was realistic. Of course, I tell my kids that they can be anything they
choose to be. But could a Snake change magically into a Horse?
Could you alter
your genus? Trump your genes and become something totally impossible to
achieve?
Snake does ultimately become a
Snorse, part Horse, part Snake, ready to tackle the adventure of life with his
friend, Horse, by his side to show him the way.
And as the kids clamour for an
encore, I realize they’re too young to think about the unreasonableness of
Snake’s desire.
It is the size of the dream that
counts, and the size of the fight in the dog, as they say.
Here Snake wants to be a Horse
with all his heart, and in the perfect world of children’s fiction, that is what
he becomes.
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