Book Details:
Book Title: 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.
"Those who have an interest in historical fiction...will find this book enlightening. It's an eye-opening read and an evocative mixture of fact and fiction." Michaela Gordoni for Portland Book Review.
"Forbes showcases her remarkable storytelling skills, promising readers an unforgettable experience." Suzie Housley for Midwest Book Review
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.
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
My Thoughts
Sunny Gale is a historical fiction story that is written by Jamie Forbes. This is my first read by this author and it will not be my last. The author has done careful research to bring her story to life. I felt myself being transported back to 1895.
Hannah has had a rough life. She moves to Nebraska to start a new life. Her mother and step father fall on hard times. Hannah finds a passion riding horses.
She soon finds herself in the Cheyenne Rodeo. She was introduced to horses by Luke. Who will eventually become her husband. Hannah finds herself choosing the rodeo and that path over her husband and children. She’s decides to reinvent herself and she becomes Sunny Gale. She pioneers women in the rodeo circuit.
I enjoyed this journey that the author took us on. She captured this time period beautifully. The story is raw and edgy. It’s so well written.
Thank you to the author, publisher and IRead book tours for allowing me read a copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.
Author Interview
Initially, I researched the lives of the women who had been involved in early rodeo. One of the best resources was Heidi Thomas’ Cowgirl Up! which is a summary of the lives of the major women in early rodeo. From there, I researched individual women to learn more. Fortunately, a lot of themhad given interviews in the latter stages of their lives.
Then I contacted the American Heritage Center archives in Laramie, Wyoming. To my great good fortune, they had a collection from a gentleman who had saved newspaper articles of Cheyenne Frontier Days from the early years and who had saved nearly all the rodeo programs from 1898 to 1920. This resource was critical because it was the history as it had happened, giving me the names of the major players, a listing of women’s events as well as the rules for those events. In its totality, the collection gave me a good snapshot of what early rodeo was like.
I also utilized a fascinating little website called “wyomingtalesandtrails.com” which had photographs anddetailed commentary on the history of each Wyoming community. That’s where I learned of the “Cheyenne Club”which, in its day, was a haven for the big landowners and bigwigs in Wyoming government. I checked today and sadly,this site is not active.
The heroine’s mother, Francine, was the hardest character for me to write. I always struggle to write weak-willed, rather than strong-willed characters. I had the same problem with thecharacterization of the hero’s mother in my previous novel, Eden. I have a hard time unraveling the make-up of women who find themselves unable to cope with reversals of fortune.Francine, having entered a bad marriage followed by adisastrous choice to migrate to unsettled Nebraska, is unable to summon the resilience needed to adapt to a different way of life. Where I think I found an anchor in developing thischaracter was in her selfless love for her daughter, despite thedaughter’s rebellion against the domesticity that Francine sees as the appropriate role for women.
The easiest character to write was Sunny Gale herself. After I wrote the first chapter, where the heroine falls in love with a wild horse, it was easy to see horses as Sunny’s pivotal focus. Despite the many distractions of career, ambition and romantic interests, I saw her as always returning to the core obsession that launched her in life.
I looked at many early twentieth century photographs of rodeo, from Cheyenne and elsewhere. I noticed a significant number of Native Americans, men and women, in rodeo events and I thought the book would be incomplete without them. Looking at the early Cheyenne Frontier Day programs, they had segregated Native American events from white events, but after having seen so many photographs of Native Americans alongside white competitors, I felt justified in concluding that the segregation wasn’t ironclad. There was a quite famous Native American rider of the period in Pendelton, Oregon named Jackson Sundown, and I based a minor character on him.
I lived nearly forty years on a ranch in Laramie, Wyoming so I am very familiar with southeastern Wyoming, and I used my knowledge of that geography extensively. I have been to nearly all the Wyoming locations in the novel.
My father’s family were pioneers in the Sandhills of Nebraska so while I have not been there, I have seen many photographs of it from the era when the novel begins (1890’s). I did research on what conditions were like in that period and there was a significant drought in the 1890’s that ended the hopes of many pioneers.
I have traveled in New Mexico only one time, but what I remember about it was the magnificence of the landscape. For all my locations what I kept uppermost in my mind was that they would have been empty of nearly everything that exists today: no fences, highways, lights, buildings, people. There is an interaction that one has with open space that I believe has the power to alter character for better or for worse, depending on how one reckons with the realization of his or her insignificance against the enormity of time and space.
This question makes me smile because I am not capable of being any of the characters in Sunny Gale. When I look at the magnitude of the achievement of these women, I feel very awed. First, start with the physical and mental make-up itwould take to engage in professional bronc riding and Romanriding (standing on two horses). There is the physical part of teaching your body to engage in these sports. There’s also the mental mindset of overcoming the fear of falling and being hurt. Then, researching these sports, I learned that professional bronc riders study out what they need to accomplish very rigorously. Bronc riding may look random and impulsive. It is anything but that. These dangerous horse sports require all of one’s mind and body.
Add to that the fact that up until 1920, women had no right to vote in any place other than Wyoming. There was little access to birth control or childcare. The idea of a woman having a “career” was quite outside the conventions of the day. Torealize their ambitions, these women needed more than passion. They needed unswerving commitment to their ambitions and the ability to withstand the objections ofanyone who would question or deny them, such as family members, and the ability to repel those with inclinations to manipulate them for gain.
I can’t think of a more daunting way of life and yet countless women were successful in it.
I started writing poems and fiction from the age I learned to write. I was encouraged by elementary school, junior high and high school teachers. I am thankful for them to this day.
While attending the University of Denver, I won the University of Denver Creative Writing Award in 1975. After I married and began a family, I wrote short stories, some of which were published in the 1990’s.
After moving to Greensboro in 1993, I stopped writing until I got an idea for a novel in 2000 based on the ranching life I had had in Wyoming. It took me seven years to write the novel. Eventually, I met up with the historical novelist, Beverly Swerling, who was a very good mentor. With her guidance, the novel I had spent years on became Unbroken, which was published by Pronghorn Press in 2010. It went on the win the WILLA Literary Award for contemporary fiction in 2011.
I then went back to writing short stories and my collection, The Widow Smalls & Other Stories, was published in 2014. It won the High Plains Book Award for a short story collection in 2015.
My novel about life in segregated North Carolina, Eden, was published by Pronghorn Press in 2020. While I am very gratified by the praise Sunny Gale has received, I think novels are steppingstones. I don’t think I could have written Sunny Gale without writing Eden first.
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Thanks so much for your lovely review and presentation of my novel, Sunny Gale.
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