Clyde

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Clyde is a powerful workhorse, who has spent his life working for Farmer and his wife. He is a hard and willing worker, and is not pleased but worried when one day he stands idle, with no one to harness him. He has been replaced by a tractor. Clyde is desolate. “I have nothing to do. Nothing. And what if they leave me in the barn forever?” He begins to imagine himself as more than a match for his rival, equipped with wheels, strong as the wind: but that is still not the answer. Too slow! Now if he were part tractor and part cheetah ... but then the horse-tractor-cheetah is too fast and uncontrollable. Perhaps if he were instead part motorbike, or eagle, or fish; or had ducks’ feet or frogs’ legs ...

The extraordinary one-horse zoo fills colourful pages with imaginary cross-breeds that never were or could be on land or sea. Clyde’s gloomy musings end happily when Farmer enters his stall with a group of children, all from farms that no longer have any horses. Farmer has decided that Clyde’s new occupation will be to give the children rides because “he is the best horse we have ever had.” Clyde can hardly believe his luck. He is the happiest Clydesdale in the world.

This is a colorful and wildly imaginative story of transformation and adaptation to change, by the author/illustrator of the exquisite Chester’s Barn.