Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Being a typical horse-loving 10 year old girl (way, way back in the day..), it almost goes without saying that of course I read Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. The story of the gentle black horse in Victorian England is simple and perfect. It's a true classic for kids, proven over several generations that have grown up reading it just as I did. With this in mind, I went looking to buy a copy at a bookstore yesterday as a birthday present for a 10 year old young lady. Now as far as I know, kids today are no less intelligent, and they do still teach them to read starting in Kindergarten. So imagine my horror at discovering that the attractively bound, hardback of Black Beauty that I picked up was, uh, *paraphrased* (actually there are more accurate terms for it, but for the sake of the Amazon censors I'd better stick to the less graphic ones). Comparing selections of this version side by side with the original, the so-called "Classic Starts" Black Beauty plot is stripped down; worse, the lovely language of the original has been replaced with, ahem, simplified text and dialog that could have been written by the author of the Judy Moody books. This left little sense of the turn of the century England setting, and completely obliterated the spirit and style of Anna Sewell. Is this the publisher's idea of a quality introduction to children's lit? What I really want to know is, why change it at all? As I said, kids today aren't less smart, they should be able to read the real Black Beauty well enough by the time they are in the 9-12 suggested age range. The reason it's a classic is because IT WORKED JUST AS IT WAS. Sorry, I had to put that in large type for the publishers, who evidently believe that the rest of the population matches their literary fluency. I hope other parents who are planning on purchasing this and other classics for their kids will catch the difference between the CS paraphrased/heavily edited/oh what the heck, dumbed down versions and the real books. Apparently the School Library Journal agrees with me on this, if you care to read their review above the customer reviews on the product page. -Andrea, aka Merribelle