SUNNY GALE | Kirkus Reviews

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.