The Eighty-Dollar Champion

The Eighty-Dollar Champion by Elizabeth Letts was an amazing book. It is a biography about Harry deLeyer and his horse Snowman. Harry is a dutch immigrant who moved the the United States after World War 2. He had lived in occupied Holland and was moving to the United States with his wife Johanna. He had always had a gift working with horses but since horse back riding was expensive he started working on a small-leased tobacco farm. Eventually after many jobs he ended up as a riding teacher at a small girls school. He was heading up to a horse auction on the weekend but arrived late and by the time he had gotten there all the horses had already been sold. The only horses left were the horses on their way to the slaughterhouse. He only had eighty dollars to buy a new school horse so decided to look around and he found a horse that caught his eye and bought him. A few years later the horse, Snowman, had won two national championships and was considered one of the top jumping horses in the world. This was an amazing story and by the end I had fallen in love with Harry and Snowman. My only complaint would be that in the beginning of the story there was alot of history and background that made the beginning of the story very slow but once I got into it I was hooked. This book really showed the amazing relationship that can develope between people and animals. At one point Harry had sold Snowman and Snowman jumped over pasture fences for weeks to get back to him. It really shows that magical relationship and how sometimes how the real champion isn't always the obvious one.