iilex 's review for:

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
4.0

The Little White Horse is about little Maria Merryweather who goes to live with her cousin at Moonacre Manor after she is left an orphan. Moonacre, her ancestral homeland, is a charming place, but the whole valley is plagued by the shadows of mistakes made in the past. Maria, along with her new friends, has to "break the curse" in order to set everything right.

I never read The Little White Horse as a child. To be honest, I hadn't ever heard of it until I caught 'Moonacre' on Netflix one day. I thought the movie was really cute, and decided to give the book a try, especially since everyone said the book was much better. Even though I'm definitely not part of the demographic for this book, I quite enjoyed it. I probably would have liked it better as a child, though. I do have to warn, though, that I personally loved reading old books as a kid, but lots of other children may be happier reading a newer book. The Little White Horse was written in the 1940s, and it certainly shows. The characters aren't fleshed out in the way a modern reader might expect and the book is certinaly more religious than your average modern kid's book. I'm sure there are many readers out there who can overlook that sort of thing, considering the book's age, but others might want to pass.

Overall, I liked this book and was sad that I didn't have a chance to read it as a kid. A few things bothered me
Spoiler(like, wtf? a 13-year-old and 15-year-old got MARRIED? Couldn't they have waited at least like, 5 years?????, and not gonna lie, the overt Christianity wasn't quite my cup of tea)
, but overall, it was a fun read.