Book Review: Protecting Beauty: Three Horses Against the Siege

The book starts out with three horses going down to a creek to get a drink of water. At the creek they notice that the water has an unpleasant smell, so they decide to head up stream to find the source. Along the way they meet up with Scout (a bird) and explain why they are travelling. Scout flies ahead to see what he can find out. The horses eventually come across wagon tracks and get attacked by a dog who is in turn killed by a mountain lion. Scout returns and tells the three horses that some humans dumped chemicals in a cave near the stream. The horses decide they need some help from humans as chemicals are outside their area of expertise.

That pretty much sums up chapter one, which is about where I stopped reading. While the story does seem to be kind of interesting, the apparent lack of editing and proofreading made this book almost unreadable. Virtually every time a character speaks the sentence starts with <characters name> says. That by itself was enough to pull me out of the story. Not to mention the numerous punctuation errors. There are many instances where the end of a portion of dialogue is missing a quotation mark.  For example:

Amos says, "I am not afraid and sings, "Get along little horsies, get along we go...

All said, this book could really use a good run through with an editor.

I do think they did a good job on the cover image. The bright colors and different style drew me to this book and I would imagine children will like the image as well.

I got to read a digital copy of this book for free through NetGalley and Hillcrest Media Group in exchange for an honest review.