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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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