Don’t trust anyone, not man, nor woman, nor child.”

Armed with these chillingly true words from his mother, and a coat — blue on one side and gray on the other — 14 year-old Robey Childs sets out on a mission with meager possessions, including a lame horse. Ill-prepared, he is lent a new horse for his dangerous journey through the carnage of Civil War battlefields, for which even the magnificent horse is in for more than he bargained. It’s a horse unlike any other, one that “leaves quite an impression … the kind that can get you killed.”

During their travels, Robey experiences the war as it tears apart lives and families on the outside, while on the inside, the boy is being brutally transformed into a man. From the moment he leaves the safety of his home and his childhood, he is exposed to the darkest side of humanity, the side that entices us to kill; he witnesses blood and gore, thievery, disrespect of human life, and people who would willingly and gladly take his life as well. He passes fields where “for no apparent reason, men had been killed, their souls set astray and their bodies left piled like rotting cord wood in ditches.”

At first repulsed, Robey soon learns that this is the way of war and mankind, and accepts it as his rite-of-passage into manhood. He steals food when he needs it, sleeps as little as possible, lies, cheats, and does everything else he must to survive, including at the expense of others in his same position. Through all of this, Robey feels guided by the coal black horse, by either its presence or lack thereof. The reader is given the clear indication that the horse is meant to be the mysterious, spiritual icon of the book. However, Olmstead develops no relationship between it and Robey, not to mention the horse and the reader. The plot had the potential to be a sophisticated one, depicting how a young boy and a young country lose their innocence. But Olmstead’s simplistic portrayal leaves the reader flat.

There is nothing for the reader to figure out about Olmstead’s characters. He lays them out in one-dimensional black-and-white, telling and not showing.

Instead of building characters and relationships, leading us along in Robey’s aging mind, Olmstead states conclusions with no basis. He leaves clumsy passages of time where crucial dialogue, both internal and external, should be. In fact, the vast majority of the book is dialogue-free, and the dialogue that does exist lacks any sort of depth or substance. Such passages as “It was beautiful to ride the back of the coal black horse and in those first few days of journey they traveled constantly” lose their depth in vague statements, instead of taking the reader through Robey’s experiences.

All in all, Coal Black Horse was a good concept but reads like a first draft. Olmstead loses his focus of the battle of the Civil War in the skirmish of appealing to young readers with an adventurous horseback journey, and older readers who can appreciate the context of the war and all its emotional implications. But flowery and overdrawn language strangle Olmstead’s simple plot. Such a horrific degree of depravity written on a fourth-grade level begs the question of who is intended to read the book, leaving old and young readers confused and unsatisfied.

Despite the title, the horse has very little to do with the story. Even still, Olmstead does successfully use the horse to get one good point across— through their journey, Robey learns that he and the horse must grow together in order to grow apart. He realizes that he cannot become a man until he learns to share himself with another being. That, Olmstead shows us, can be the most painful kind of war.