I love horses every since I was a wee girl and since I could read, books, movies and TV shows about horses and dogs have been my favorite ones. Now I am a senior and my love has never wavered and only grown stronger. My dream like the young man in this book, Steve, was to have a horse of my own. I do now. I read "Island Stallion" at my horse ranch and enjoyed it very much. It is a bit old way of speaking, the old British way that is and at times I thought too formal in speech. Still, the story about Steve's love and his cousin's Pitch, who is with him on this island adventure, is about going forth to discover what you so wish to find. I liked the story and it is good for those young and old interested in adventure and animals, especially horses. I have read "The Black Stallion" what the author, Walter Farley, is mostly well known for.What the story is about: Steve Duncan is visiting a cousin, Professor Phil Pitch, who lives in the Caribbean for a summer vaction. They take a boat to an inhabitable island - a rather wild one that has a few stray not so healthy or great horses. It is called Azul Island. Steve had a dreams when he was a very young boy about a red horse and believed he could find it someday. Well, he does on this island and Pitch findswhat he is seeking too, Conquistador's treasures and proof they did indeed inhabit this island at some time. The red stallion Steve finds is named Flame by him. Flame is the stallion to a herd of mares and young horses and he was left by the Conquistadors.Another character, the half-brother to Pitch named Tom, is a brutal horse dealer. He's been to the island to grab whatever horses he can from the band of not so healthy ones. He doesn't know about Flame and the better horses though. The book has a brutal moment toward the end between two stallion horses, but it is part of nature although a young child reading this book might not like it.All in all, I enjoyed the book.
This is a great read, separate from the Black Stallion series.A boy called Steve Duncan is staying with a friend who is a history professor called Phil Pitcher or Pitch. One day Pitch takes Steve by boat to a looming rocky island called Azul Island - meaning Blue in Spanish. Nobody really knows why as the cliffs are bare rock and there is just a sandy spit to land on where allegedly the Conquistadores had some connection. Steve is more interested in horses than in the professor's lessons. However a storm comes up and their small boat gets tossed into a hidden channel which reveals a secret passageway into the interior of the hollow island, to a grassy land and blue lake.Another author would have made this a pirate treasure story; Farley of course gives us a large herd of beautiful horses left by the Conquistadores and gone wild. To both Steve and Pitch there could be no better treasure. A fiery chestnut stallion which Steve names Flame allows Steve to befriend him (these horses had no predators) while Pitch wants to keep the lost world secret until he has had a proper chance to study the antique cannons and other artefacts.One of Farley's best books, which makes it one of the best horse stories around, this will bring young people to read it again and again. The island stallion appears in other books such as The Island Stallion Races which was also Farley's experiment with science fiction. He combined his two series in The Black Stallion and Flame - which brings the Black to Azul Island - and a couple of later stories.
Do You like book The Island Stallion (1980)?
This was a very strange addition to the Black Stallion series... It's really not related (not that I recall anyway), but I remember being able to tell the order of the series by these numbers on the spine (F-1, F-2... this was F-4). Once again there's a kid who finds a wild horse on an island... and then these aliens come along. From what I remember, there were two men who were really aliens who get involved in the horse racing business. Maybe I'm making this up, but I remember the aliens very clearly, they had weird eyes, and one of them described horse racing as it had been in the 1880s, even though he couldn't have possibly seen them, it being 1950 or whatever. Yeah, so horse racing and aliens.
—Kate
Okay, it's a little embarrassing that I'm even reviewing this. Like I said earlier, the bar exam made me mentally and emotionally regress to about 2nd-grade level, and I couldn't resist re-reading this installment in the Black Stallion series that I picked up for $2. These books were seriously my absolute favorites when I was a kid. I have to say, though, maybe I should stop re-reading these old classics because they're, well, they're just not as good as you remember. Like, seriously. This one I used to love because not only is there the boy-horse love story that exists in all of Walter Farley's novels, but there's also a mysterious lost island and buried treasure and even a map (oh, how I love books with maps). But it's kind of totally cheesy, and the main character's single-minded obsession with possessing this wild horse he finds verges on creepy. Maybe it didn't seem so creepy in 1948 or whenever this was written. Good times, though. And now that the bar is over I can return to reading grown-up books (although I can't promise I won't return to other childhood faves that I stumble across in used bookstores).
—Becky
When ever anyone says "The Black Stallion" - THIS is the book I think of. I remember so many random little things about this story - the chalk arrows/drawings in the caves, lamenting the flashlight parts they DIDN'T bring, how they worried over the fight with the Piebald and the future mating issues. I'm sure it's been 30 year since I read it, but I still love this book.
—Summerfly
