Shipwreck off the Spanish coast: a boy and an untamed Arab stallion the sole survivors. This promising situation, led up to by a logical sequence of events, is used in [The Black Stallion,] an adventure story whose outsize plot is curbed by a firm attention to the relationship between the hero, Alec Ramsay, an American high-school boy, and the stallion who comes to be known as the Black. (p. 3406)

[The subsequent books in the Black Stallion series] are essentially tales of a horse and its fortunes and at times Alec seems little more than a necessary link in the narrative. His character is lightly sketched and the decisions he has to make, about finishing at college and about the financial risks of starting a racing stud, are offered to the reader with little depth, as the necessary realistic backing for crucial scenes where the Black's ferocity or his...