Seneca

After describing the first encounter with her horse, Seneca, a girl recites the daily rounds, responsibilities and pleasures of owning a horse. From after-school barn chores to trail rides, from grooming to feeding, readers step into a sketch of the horse-and-rider life. Baker's (illustrator of Leaving Home with a Pickle Jar) text is strewn with horsey paraphernalia (curry comb, bridle) and parlance (canter, trot).Unfortunately, the dry, school-report prose has little bounce or kick. Perhaps it lacks tension and immediacy because describing a typical, hypothetical day, rather than a specific one, puts the narrator at a remove: ""Often on our rides we pass a cow pasture. All the cows stop grazing and stare at us."" Although Baker's subdued watercolors of the real-life Seneca (a pure white beauty) apply some spur, they are too muted and the characters' faces too vacant to energize it. Readers who love anything equine, however, may yet appreciate this nostalgic homage to a childhood horse. Ages 4-up. (Mar.)