The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse that Inspired a Nation is about a man and a horse. I know, that sounds super corny and we’ve heard that said a million times about a man and a fill-in-the-blank. But this really is.

First, let me say that I am not a fan of the horse industry. Horses used for sport, and animals in general, are too often treated as throwaways (former Kentucky Derby winner, Ferdinand, was sold for human consumption in Japan in 2002) and suffer catastrophic injuries (remember Barbaro?). The fact that this book is actually about a horse that was on the truck ready for the slaughterhouse before he was rescued and a well-known and much loved horse has to be killed in the jumping ring serve to highlight my problems with these sports and the horse industry. In the book, the owners who sold a famous horse during the middle of a show stated that they weren’t sentimentally attached to the horse, it was just business.

Well, one of the reasons I loved this book so much was that for Harry De Leyer, it wasn’t just business. He’d survived Nazi occupation of his country, Holland, during World War II, never realized his dreams of representing his country at the Olympics or on the competitive horse circuit and gave up his chance to work his family farm in order to help his younger brother. Then, in 1950, in order to create a better life for himself, he decided to move to America, bringing his young wife, Johanna, with him. He even gave up working with animals and riding when he first came to the United States, instead working on a tobacco farm in an effort to provide for his family, though he eventually found a way to do the thing he loved most, ride horses. So Harry knew about hardship and the desire to fulfill your dreams. And when he saw a dirty gray plow horse standing calmly on a slaughterhouse-bound truck, he recognized something in that horse and knew he couldn’t leave him there to die. I know, this sounds like the tagline for a sappy movie, but the book is anything but sappy.

The book is written in such great detail, I felt like I was with Harry and Snowy every step of the way. When reading about the shows they were entered in I felt like I was watching the events unfold and often found myself gasping when reading about the height of the jumps and how the horses fared when flying over them. More than once I groaned when a sentence started or finished with “Harry could tell something was not right...” or when Snowman clipped a pole. And when Snowman and Harry won events, I was probably grinning like an idiot as I was reading. And in the end, reading about the death of Snowman (I’m not spoiling anything here ‘cause, let’s face it, this horse isn’t over sixty and tooling around a meadow somewhere) I was biting my lip and my eyes were definitely doing that burning you-know-you-want-to-cry thing. I wondered if the author was taking descriptive liberties with the events of the book, as they were so detailed, but when I read a note about the sources she used, I realized she did an amazing amount of research to make sure her story was accurate, with the most important primary source being Harry himself.

I really wish that I hadn’t just won an advance uncorrected proof of this book from Goodreads. And no, I’m not, sorry for the phrase, looking a gift horse in the mouth, I know I’m lucky to not only get a copy for free but be able to read it before it’s published, but I loved this book so much it’s staying in my library and I would’ve loved to have the hardbound version of it.

The only real problem I had with it, which is super minor and they might be different in the finished version, is the pictures. There were a fair amount of them throughout, which is great, but they were all black and white (I know color film was available, but maybe it wasn’t used by the De Leyers and others who supplied photos), and many are so dark that it’s hard to see detail. Also, some of them didn’t seem like they were placed with the corresponding story and the titles could have had a bit more detail. Like I said, this may just be due to the fact that this is not a final copy of the book.

The Eighty-Dollar Champion is a quick, effortless read. Harry was the ultimate horseman, not only was he one of the best riders of his time, but he truly loved his horses, especially Snowman, while Snowman was a supremely calm, gentle horse who showed that he had more heart and talent than anyone would expect a former workhorse could have. Pick up this book, you won’t be sorry you did.