As a mother I understand the urgency of wanting our children to learn lessons. Lessons that might keep them alive. If anything happened to my sons I think I'd stop breathing. My world would stop. Oh how my heart breaks for those that lose children. I felt the same sort of fear and heartbreak for the mother in this book. Her love for her son was apparent.
Before sending her fourteen year old son off to find his father in the bloodshed of The Civil War she must tell him all things that might save his life. His survival is key. She must assure herself and him that his heart will beat beyond the number that her heart will beat. The quiet strength of relationships between parent and child is what struck me in this novel. It’s the same connection I felt when I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I loved lines in Coal Black Horse like,

“Remember,” she said, reaching her hands to his shoulders, “dangers passes by those who face up to it” (Chapter 1)

And…..

“After a time, long and purposeful, she cast her eyes on him, but she did not gift him with her smile. She reached up and he bent down and she hesitantly touched him at the side of his face. Her fingers lingered on his cheek and neck as if she were not one with eyesight but was a blinded woman seeing with her fingers, and then she held a button and tugged and he felt as if she was pulling the inside of his chest” (Chapter 1)

Anyway, I found that these lines hit me to my core.

The connection between horse and lad seemed less than definitive which was odd given the name of the book. I thought this would liken itself to The Black Stallion by Walter Farley. The horse seemed essential to the young lad’s physical survival, and seemed a foreshadowing that the boy’s journey would mold him into the man he would be the rest of his life but the relationship between boy and horse didn’t really confirm that, just hinted at it, and it took a great leap for my mind to make any of these connections with the author’s less that definitive writing style. Plus, as a reader I wanted to read about a boy and his horse facing these cruel times together as one, but the horse was portrayed as just a horse, that though intuitive had no thought or feeling about the journey they were partaking in. True black horses are rare, such as this boy, and I wanted to know more about them.

Also, I can’t write as well as Olmstead, yet I think the mechanics of the novel sometimes took away from the story. More editing and development would have placed this novel in the masterpiece section. To come so close to a true work of genius made me rather sad, but I still found it a realistic and touching novel.