SuitabookSafe
Vanessa Harbour
- Reading
- You could read alongside the child, pausing after attacks, discoveries or accounts of wartime loss. Afterwards, explore how the story connects personal rescue with the wider experiences of displaced children.
- Themes
- Responsibility under danger: Kizzy and Jakob are deceived, separated from home and placed in a position of protecting horses and displaced children. The situation foregrounds responsibility and trust, but the extracts do not establish whether every choice is endorsed or rewarded.
- Displacement and belonging: The mansion shelters children displaced by war, and the group seeks safety and a route home while families have been lost. The story brings wartime displacement into the children’s immediate experience and, according to the supplied discussion, links it to wider historical experiences.
- Human and animal vulnerability: The children encounter forty abandoned horses alongside children needing protection, and the rescue mission involves danger and some animal injuries. The parallel vulnerabilities invite discussion of care, but the extracts do not show how consistently the book balances human and animal needs.
- Worth knowing
- Approach it as emotionally serious adventure, not just a horse story. The wartime peril, deaths, serious illness, injured horses and accounts of families killed by Nazis may merit preparation and pauses for discussion.