2025 Will Rogers Medallion Recipient--historical fiction Listed in Best Indie Books of 2024--Kirkus Reviews Eric Hoffer Book Awards Finalist Feathered Quill Book Awards Finalist It's 1895 and fourteen year old Hannah Brandt struggles with the harsh realities of life on a new Nebraska homestead. Her imagination is captured by a wild filly that she ultimately loses, but the door to her destiny opens. Three years later she enters the first Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo, where she wins a relay race and begins a quest to tackle the ultimate horse sport, saddle bronc riding. She takes a new name, Sunny Gale, and pursues a career in rodeo, much to the disgust of her young husband and Victorian-era mother. With every move, she defies convention as the drive to compete takes over her life, leaving everything else behind, including husbands and children. Sunny Gale is a story of the social mores of the early 20th century and of a woman determined to wrest free of them no matter how high the personal cost or where her choices will lead.
