A moving, memorable, and fully realized rodeo saga.
In Forbes’ historical novel, a woman fights for the right to compete in rodeos—and becomes a star in the process.
When Hannah Brandt, who comes from a hardscrabble background in Ohio and Nebraska, first gets to ride a horse in 1895 at the age of 14,she realizes that there is no going back to the way things were: Her destiny is to be a rodeo star and break new ground as a female bronco rider. She wins first place in a race at the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo at 18, and soon she’s known by a new name: Sunny Gale. Her marriage to her first husband, Luke Mangum, ends in divorce and she’s taken in by the Pickering clan, who are rodeo royalty. After she marries Tad Pickering, her star continues to rise as she and her spouse amaze crowds with “Roman Riding,” each of them standing astride two galloping horses. When tragedy occurs, Sunny quits the clan and moves on again, leaving behind her mother, Francine; her daughter, Mollie; and her son, Scott. She experiences more ups and downs as the years go by, including times of great sadness. She finds a refuge in New Mexico with one-legged rancher Angus Laroche, who dispenses tough love to her when she really needs it. But her love life continues to be complicated, and the novel’s resolution sees her life come full circle, after a fashion.
This is a story of rodeos, marriages, sexism, and social mores—all churned together. In a wonderful afterword, Forbes offers a little-known real-life account of when women competed in the roughest of rodeo events from the very end of the 19th century to the early 1930s, In fact, Sunny Gale is modeled on the real-life Prairie Rose Henderson, and her rival, Ruth Pickering, is inspired by Bonnie McCarroll. These women’s competitions became as big a draw as the men’s, and they were quite lucrative; it was only after some tragic mishaps that censorious men took the opportunity to subjugate female riders again. The uneasy truce between the sexes is evident on every page of the novel; for example, after Hannah’s first outing and win, Luke proudly announces to the press that she’s “Mrs. Luke Mangum.” However, it’s made clear that, for Sunny, the rodeo always comes first—no matter how rough that is on her spouses and, notably, on her children. Forbes effectively portrays her as a sympathetic rather than annoyingly self-involved. Most readers will understand her actions, simply because she’s consistently self-aware and never forgets the costs of her choices. Forbes is an experienced author, and her latest novel is beautifully, even poetically, written with well-developed characters. At one point, while sidelined by pregnancy, Sunny glumly realizes that “fecundity, not horsemanship, was the exalted state toward which women were to aspire.” Yet, years later, reflecting on the vital dates on Mollie’s tombstone, a stricken Sunny gazes on “Time locked in brackets which even the stoutest heart couldn’t break.”
A moving, memorable, and fully realized rodeo saga.Pub Date: May 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781941052723
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Pronghorn Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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