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.

“Forbes is an experienced author, and her latest novel is beautifully, even poetically, written with well-developed characters…A moving, memorable, and fully realized rodeo saga.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Forbes captures an accurate picture of the relentless drive to compete along with a fascinating story of the earliest women in rodeo.”—Abe Morris, author of My Cowboy Hat Still Fits

“Powerful, poignant, and authentic, Sunny Gale reveals how women once ruled rodeo, a story long hidden from history.”—Lynn Downey, author of Dudes Rush In and Dude or Die

“Sunny Gale is exciting, well-written and developed, and will make the reader laugh and cry throughout.”—Kathy Stickles, Feathered Quill Book Reviews