I get what Rush was trying to do here — make entertaining books for kids that told a non-liberal view of U.S. history. If I'd read it when I was 12, I probably would have liked it. But it fell a little flat for me now. The humor wasn't really clever or funny. The horse's weird abilities — and the explanation of how he got them — were a distraction. The thing that bothered me most was how Rush and the two kids kept popping in and out of the story every few months but the Pilgrims never wondered where they'd been or why they weren't participating in the community most of the time. It was just explained away as "We've been exploring."

The point of the book was that the Pilgrims tried socialism when they first got to their new home but soon had all sorts of problems — which immediately disappeared as soon as they went to a market economy.