Teaser: A 17 year old orphan boy steals 13 horses and in the process finds a family.
Plot Summary: Tullis Yoder is a 17 year-old orphan that works with the Chickalookee Rodeo in Florida as a bull-rider. He loves working with the rodeo and its 13 horses. When the rodeo runs out of money Tullis is told it will be shutting down. In fear of losing his only family and not wanting the horses to be slaughtered for dog meat, he devises a plan he never thought he would do. He decides to save the horses by stealing them. He enlists the help of a female doctor, an elderly horse thief. Along the way many things come up such as being chased by crooks, the sheriff and a judge. Tullis also finds love. Will Tullis be able to escape capture and keep the family and new love he has found?
Critical Evaluation: This book is set in Depression Era Florida. The descriptions are vivid and the reader feels like they are at the rodeo with Tullis in the Depression Era. The character of Tullis Yoder is a tough one. He has dreams of becoming a famous bull-rider but when the rodeo he works for shuts down, he has nowhere to go. So he along with the help of others decides to steal the horses from the rodeo so they will not be slaughtered. His determination to survive and save his family is what makes this character believable. He has a great passion for the people in his life and animals in his life and he will stop at nothing to keep them alive.
Author Information: According to http://www.bookrags.com/biography/robert-newton-peck/ "Robert Peck (born 1928) won critical and popular acclaim for his first novel, A Day No Pigs Would Die (1973). Critics lauded its unsentimental rendering of farm life and the often brutal realities of the natural world, and the book is now a frequently studied text in junior high school classrooms.
Peck was born in rural Vermont to Shaker farmers whose hard yet rewarding lives inspired much of his fiction. He commented: "A Day No Pigs Would Die was influenced by my father, an illiterate farmer and pig-slaughterer whose earthy wisdom continues to contribute to my understanding of the natural order and the old Shaker beliefs deeply rooted in the land and its harvest." The first of his family to learn to read and write, Peck was profoundly influenced by his grade school teacher and later based the character Miss Kelly in the Soup series of novels on her. As a young man he found employment as a lumberjack, hog butcher, and paper-mill worker."
Genre: Western/Historical
Curriculum Ties: Depression Era
Booktalking Ideas: Ask teens to talk about what it would be like to live in the Depression Era as an orphan.
Reading Level/Interest Age: 14+
Challenge Issues: N/A
Why included? I wanted to include a western book in my database and a librarian recommended anything by Robert Newton Peck.
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