A Horse Named Sky

The main characters are horses, who see and describe each other in terms of their color (dun, bay, palomino, etc.) and see the humans they meet the same way, so, for example, one of the riders is called a palomino with blue eyes, and the groom (who, the afterword explains, represents the Paiute kids enslaved by silver miners in the era) is a bay. As elsewhere in author Parry's books, gender roles are rigidly defined by biological determinism, but within these constraints, mares wield most of the actual power, and Sky's filly friend Storm is a better fighter than most of the young boys. There's a lot of detail and suggestions for further reading in the afterword about the disastrous impact of Nevada's silver rush on the indigenous people, animals, and environment that were there already.

There's no gore, but terrible things happen to horse characters, forced from their homes and captured by earth-pillaging silver miners: Sky and a friend are burned and scarred with red-hot branding irons; most of his family are captured and being worked to death in the mines, his mom is blind and his are aunties crippled. Vivid scenes of desperate struggles of horses fighting their would-be captors, and sometimes succeeding. An empathetic, sad young boy who's kind to Sky is also an enslaved captive who gets smacked around by his cruel boss.

Brief references to horses peeing and pooping as part of social interaction and/or coping.