I am uniquely qualified to assemble this list because I gave my heart and head to the fictional and true West in fourth grade. When I learned California history, enraptured by images of wild horses and vaqueros, the cruelty of bear and bullfighting (no one talked then about cruelty to “converted” Native Americans), and the myth of Zorro. I grabbed the chance to move to the cowgirl state of Nevada, where I learned to love the scents of sagebrush and alkali flats. Research for my fiction and non-fiction has given me license to ride in a Pony Express reenactment and 10-day cattle drive and spend all night bottle-feeding an orphan mustang.
I saw a well-used copy of this book in the bunkhouse of real cowboys. That totally confirmed the way I felt–that this book is authentic. Yes, it has the feel of the mythical West I fell in love with as a girl, but it’s gritty and quirky, too.
Who would guess that Augustus, a tough-as-leather former Texas Ranger, would bring two pigs on a hundreds of miles-long cattle drive? Not for eating, but because he couldn’t leave those friendly pets behind. His heart is tender, though he’s tough as any Western man you ever imagined.
Whenever I (unwillingly) think of Blue Duck, I realize he is the worst literary villain I’ve ever read. Thinking of him gives me chills, just as thinking of Captain Call makes me reluctantly admire him. He is a man with foot-thick emotional armor, but his sense of honor is just as strong. Plus, he calls his favorite horse Hell Bitch, and she suits him.
Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning novel is a powerful, triumphant portrayal of the American West as it really was. From Texas to Montana, it follows cowboys on a grueling cattle drive through the wilderness.
It begins in the office of The Hat Creek Cattle Company of the Rio Grande. It ends as a journey into the heart of every adventurer who ever lived . . .
More than a love story, more than an adventure, Lonesome Dove is an epic: a monumental novel which embraces the spirit of the last defiant wilderness of America.
When I taught Developmental Reading (aka English for Gang Members) in Los Angeles, this book made them cry. Sad stories that include animals can jab straight into the most sheltered heart, while books about suffering humans only evoke yawns.
Reading this as an adult, it’s clearly NOT a horse story, but that’s its camouflage. There’s a lot of death in this book–a beloved pony, an old man with a stolen old horse, a mare giving birth, and the main character’s innocence. Childhood innocence dies over and over again. Just when his faith in what matters resurfaces, it gets smacked down again. The older I get, the more this book hurts.
Jody, the boy at the center of all 3 parts of the book (there are different versions of the book…some have 4 parts), wants to put the adults in his life on pedestals, but his father is as callous as the gang kids I taught, and the ranch hand who fights for Jody’s trust is ruthless in trying to earn it.
So why do I love this book? Yes, I like initiation stories, but more than that, it is beautifully written and takes place in the earlier days of Northern California, where I grew up. That beauty, familiarity, and pain create a sense of yearning that’s absolutely a flashback to adolescence.
Written at a time of profound anxiety caused by the illness of his mother, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck draws on his memories of childhood in these stories about a boy who embodies both the rebellious spirit and the contradictory desire for acceptance of early adolescence. Unlike most coming-of-age stories, the cycle does not end with a hero "matured" by circumstances. As John Seelye writes in his introduction, reversing common interpretations, The Red Pony is imbued with a sense of loss. Jody's encounters with birth and death express a common theme in Steinbeck's fiction: They are parts…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
This ranch-centered book puts a human face on the cost of war.
A best in the West (or at least his small Nevada town) bull rider is physically and mentally torn apart by war. He can’t see the future he envisioned for himself anymore. But the story is really about his younger brother, Cam. I love Cam’s humor most of all, but his devotion to his idolized big brother is what makes this more than a story about a skateboarder turned bull rider.
This book is about family in an opposite way from The Red Pony it confirms the safety net family can provide.
Cam O'Mara, grandson and younger brother of bull-riding champions, is not interested in partaking in the family sport. Cam is a skateboarder, and perfecting his tricks—frontside flips, 360s—means everything until his older brother, Ben, comes home from Iraq, paralyzed from a brain injury. What would make a skateboarder take a different kind of ride? And what would get him on a monstrosity of a bull named Ugly? If Cam can stay on for the requisite eight seconds, could the $15,000 prize bring hope and a future for his big brother?
I’m still not satisfied with delayed gratification! In great words and pictures, this book sums up that rebellion against getting great stuff later. A little boy is repeatedly told he can ride a horse along with his cowgirl mom and rancher dad “someday.”
I grew up with chronic asthma that was aggravated by running, playing, dust, and horse hair. Doctors told me that I’d outgrow it "someday." That didn’t help. On television and in books, I soaked up the free-wheeling freedom of riding. And wanted it. I longed to ride so much that–like the boy in this book–my parents saw it was important. About once a month, my parents rented a horse that I could ride along the (now cement-lined) riverbeds of Southern California.
Yes, they’d be up all night with me, wheezing. No, they weren’t giving in to me. They satisfied my need to be myself–not a cowgirl, but someone who wanted to escape the confinement of asthma to the freedom of being high off the ground, riding into the winds of freedom, if just for a little while.
Kenny loves to go down to the corral to watch his father and the other cowboys bridle and saddle their horses. When he sees them ride off into the far hills, he wishes he were going with them. "Someday you will," his mother tells him. "I'm tired of somedays," Kenny answers. "I don't want to be a someday rider. I want to ride right now."
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Lake Song is set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region. This novel in stories spans decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the…
This book isn’t fiction, but it feels like it. I am wrapped in the reality of the frontier through letters, diaries, recipes, and great old photos–every time I pick it up. And that’s often.
I first gave this book to my mother, but my husband paged through it so many hours each time we visited that I gave him his own copy. Cooking on the trail, on cattle drives, in camps, and finally, on hardscrabble ranches and farms isn’t easy. The book is full of struggles, and I feel for the women who wrested survival out of the earth daily.
They write about being driven crazy by the relentless wind, shortages, and loneliness, but there are plenty of jolly–it’s the best word for their beaming faces–pictures. I love what those old photos show: an appreciation for nature, family, and farm animals, and their determination to have tea parties and make wine and brandy out of anything that came to hand!
Samantha Forster didn’t mean to be a horse thief. She lives in a time of cell phones and computers, not the old West. But she discovers men staging illegal wild horse round-ups with a “Judas horse.” The small, starved mare unconsciously leads fleeing mustangs into a hay-filled trap.
When the rustlers leave the mare unattended, Sam rescues her. The arrival of the traumatized, dangerous mare–and the sheriff–complicates an already bad time for financially shaky Riverbend Ranch. They’re piloting a horseback program for at-risk teen girls, and Sam would rather work with the rescued mare than the defiant girl she’s paired with. Things get scary when the horse rustlers learn Sam’s to blame for tipping off the law. Now, it’s up to Sam to keep the mare–and herself–safe.
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
Mother of Trees is the first book in an epic fantasy series about a dying goddess, a broken world, and a young elf born without magic in a society ruled by it.
When the ancient being that anchors the world’s power begins to fail, the consequences ripple outward—through prophecy, politics,…
