October 21 to November 8, 2024
Book Details:
SUNNY GALE: A NOVEL
by Jamie Lisa Forbes
Category: Adult Fiction 18+, 268 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Novel
Publisher: Pronghorn Press
Release date: May, 2024
Formats Available for Review: print-softback (USA only) and ebook (PDF, NetGalley download)
Tour dates: Oct 21 to Nov 8, 2024
Content Rating: PG-13 +M: There is no profane language. There are some sexual scenes, non explicit. There is one instance of sexual abuse that is more recollected than described. My specific reason for giving this rating was two scenes where animals are harmed intentionally.
Book Description:
It’s 1895 and fourteen year old Hannah Brandt is struggling with the hard life on a new Nebraska homestead. When her imagination is captured by a wild filly she becomes obsessed with horses, which opens the door to her destiny. Just four years later she enters the first Cheyenne Frontier Day rodeo where she wins the relay race and her fate is sealed. She gives herself a new name, Sunny Gale, and pursues a rodeo career, much to the disgust of her young husband and her very proper mother. Sunny defies convention with every move as the drive to compete takes over her life, leaving everything else behind, including husbands and children. It is a rough life she has chosen, but she craves the glory of the spotlight and refuses to bow to the expectations for a woman in her time.
Award winning author Jamie Lisa Forbes has once again brought us complex characters in a story based on real women and the early days when rodeo was wide open for them to become stars. It is a story of the social mores of the times and of a woman determined to defy them no matter how high the personal cost or where that choice might take her.
MY REVIEW
I’m always excited when I see a confident, strong female as the main character. Hannah may not have been so strong when, at the age of 14, her family moves to Nebraska. It’s 1895 and you can imagine how the family struggled to make a go of it on the brutal frontier. Winter was almost their undoing. Something awful happens and Hannah can never forgive her stepfather. But that doesn’t stop her from pursuing her dream of learning to ride a horse. In fact, when she becomes a woman and starts calling herself Sunny Gale, the rodeo is her passion.
This book really grabbed hold of me. I’ve always loved horses and easily empathized with Sunny. Though I never pursued a career in the rodeo, I was enthralled as Sunny shared her journey.
A most excellent historical adventure. I’m excited to try the author’s other books now.
5 STARS
WANNA OLSEN
I became the Forbes family member designated to visit Wanna Olsen when we put up hay next to her ranch. She would have preferred my father, who she adored, but if he had gone, he would have only stood there chafing at her ramblings while the hay waved in the breeze, unmowed. My father hated diversions, especially when they involved unending conversation.
Mrs. Olsen loved my father because he had kept her out of prison. In 1956, she was charged with thieving water for irrigation. That is a crime in Wyoming. The one use my father made of his Yale law degree was to represent Ms. Olsen pro bono. And he won, endearing him to Ms. Olsen forever.
Of course, she had committed the crime as had every other rancher on the Little Laramie River, including my father, in that drought year.
She spoke with a thick Swedish accent, and I was never sure that I understood her or that she understood me. She lived in a tight little cabin with giant cottonwoods all around. And when I visited, she showed me the photos that she had showed me the year before of her childhood in Sweden, her husband who had died back in the 1940’s, her daughter who had been killed in a plane crash.
She had no telephone, no running water, no electricity. This was how she had begun her life in Wyoming, she said, and this is how she would end. She had fed her cattle, irrigated her meadows, chopped her water holes in the winter for years and years. No question, as she abided season by season that she loved the river murmuring outside her door, the breezes in her cottonwoods.
In my senior year in college, I heard she had been found comatose outside the cabin and then she was moved to a nursing home in Laramie. On a bright summer morning in 1977, the nursing home brought her out to us. She had asked to see my father. She wept to see him.
We all stood there in the barnyard on our way out to the hayfields: my father, the hay crew including me, the van driver looking uncomfortable and Wanna Olsen, leaning on her walker.
She grabbed my father’s hand and said, “Jimmy, let me stay.”
My father said, “I can’t.”
“I’ll stay in your bunkhouse,” she said. “I won’t be any trouble. I’ll look after myself.”
I felt her heartbreak as sure as if it were my own. Don’t let them tear me away from the trees, the river, the wind, the sky.
All of us were half-hoping my father would give in. The van driver said, “C’mon now, Wanna. These people have their work to do. Let them be.” And he shuffled her off, but not before she looked back over her shoulder, her blue eyes taking in one last look at what, she and I had mutely agreed, was the only heaven we would ever know.
.
Meet Author Jamie Lisa Forbes:
Jamie Lisa Forbes was raised on a ranch in the Little Laramie Valley near Laramie, Wyoming. She attended the University of Colorado where she obtained degrees in English and philosophy. After fourteen months living in Israel, she returned to her family’s ranch where she lived for another fifteen years.
In 1994, she moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. In 2001, she graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law and began her North Carolina law practice.
Forbes’ first novel, Unbroken, won the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction in 2011. Her collection of short stories, The Widow Smalls and Other Stories, won the High Plains Book Awards for a short story collection in 2015.
Forbes’ novel of rural North Carolina in the segregation era, entitled Eden, was published in 2020. Her historical novel about women bronc riders in the early days of rodeo, entitled Sunny Gale, was published in May 2024 by Pronghorn Press.
Ms. Forbes continues to live—and write—in North Carolina.
Connect with the author: website ~ facebook ~ pinterest ~ X ~ goodreads
Tour Schedule:
Oct 21 – Cover Lover Book Review – book spotlight
Oct 21 – @this.human.reads * – book review
Oct 21 – @stars.and.embers * – book review
Oct 21 – @acourtofspinesnpages * – book review
Oct 21 – @bearyintobooks * – book review
Oct 22 –@adriftinfictionalworld – book review
Oct 23 – @bookscape__ * – book review
Oct 24 – Deborah-Zenha Adams – book spotlight / author interview
Oct 25 –Book Corner News and Reviews – book review
Oct 28 – Sharing Life’s Moments – book review
Oct 28 – Gina Rae Mitchell – book review / guest post
Oct 28 – @jilljemmett * – book review
Oct 28 – @onceuponamaltesereader * – book review
Oct 29 – @bookameme * – book review
Oct 30 – Locks, Hooks and Books – book review / guest post
Oct 30 – @kiv_coffeeandpages * – book review
Oct 31 – Cheryl’s Book Nook – book review
Oct 31 – @alwaysreadingxo * – book review
Nov 1 – @Leannebookstagram – book review
Nov 2 – @readsandmusic * – book review
Nov 4 – FUONLYKNEW – book review / guest post
Nov 5 – Books R Us – book spotlight / guest post
Nov 5 – Country Mamas With Kids – book review
Nov 6 – Bigreadersite – book review
Nov 7 – Connie’s History Classroom – book review / author interview
Nov 8 – Liese’s Blog – book spotlight
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