New West Young Readers Book Review

Twins, Horses, Cute Boys, and Western Water Rights Fuel “Wild Horse Creek” Series

By Jenny Shank, 8-16-09

Wild Horse Creek: The Mystery Stallion
by Sharon Siamon
Walrus Books, 123 pages, ages 9-12, $8.95

A few weeks ago I was at The Bookworm in Boulder and a ten-year-old girl in riding clothes came in with her mother, looking for novels with horses in them.  She’d read the classics: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and The Black Stallion by Walter Farley and its sequels.  I overheard and suggested Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry—I found Henry’s books in the library one summer, big square volumes with horse head portraits on the front, and read them all back-to-back. 

The girl had too, but horse-loving girls are perennial, so there are plenty of contemporary horse books for young readers, and the girl and her mother went off to look for the many books with horses or horseshoes on their spines.  There’s the Wild Horse Island and Phantom Stallion series by Terri Farley (who isn’t related to Walter Farley), the Thoroughbred series by Joanna Campbell (who, incidentally, also writes adult romances under the name Jo Ann Simon) and the Heartland and Chestnut Hill series by Lauren Brooke, the former of which has been made into a Canadian television series, and latter of which looks very East-Coast-prep-school-ish, with a crest on the cover of every title.

Canadian author Sharon Siamon works with Western settings in her Mustang Mountain books, set in the Canadian Rockies, and the new Wild Horse Creek series, set in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.  The first book in the series, The Mystery Stallion gets off to a lively start with its heroines, twin sisters Sophie and Liv, leaving their Vancouver home to visit their grandparents’ Arizona ranch and encountering just about every danger the desert has to offer: rattlesnakes, rampaging javelinas, aggressive mustangs, baking sun, flash floods in the arroyos and even water rights squabbles. 

You wouldn’t water rights would be of interest to young girls, but Siamon works it in so it’s all a part of the drama.  Sophie and Liv’s grandparents, Ted and Sandra Starr, are getting on in years, and the villain of the book, Sam Regis, who owns the luxury ranch and resort next door, covets their watering hole.  When the lead Stallion of the Starr herd of Spanish Barbs turns up injured, his mares scattered, Ted thinks Regis is responsible, because he “wants the horses off the land so he’ll have an excuse to say we’re not usin’ the spring.  Then he can come in and steal my water.”

Although the water rights plot angle is unusual for this kind of series, Siamon doesn’t skimp on any of the other key components.  There are horses, twins with opposite personalities (a subject that has interested young readers since before the Sweet Valley High series), cute boys (including Shane, the trusty teenage cowhand who lives in an Airstream trailer with his dad and works for the Starrs), and even a mean-girl villain, Dayna Regis.  It’s a memorable moment when Dayna shows up:

“Hours later, while Sophie was in the barn checking on Diego, she heard the purr of a big truck engine outside.  She raced to the barn door in time to see a red double-cab pickup roll into the ranch yard…The girl was a vision.  She had a healthy, glowing tan, perfect skin, tawny hair, designer jeans and a fringed leather jacket that floated around her as she moved.  Every inch of her, from hat to white leather boots, was decorated with turquoise and silver.”

The adults are occupied with other business—Grandma is sick and in the hospital for tests, Grandpa Starr by her side, and the twins’ mother is busy helping them and seems distracted ("Dad moved out in December,” Liv reports)—leaving the kids to handle whatever troubles arise at the ranch.  Sophie bears the brunt of those problems, ending up bitten by a rattlesnake, knocked off a horse, stranded in a mesquite patch, and harried by malodorous javelinas.

Although these books are intended for readers aged nine to twelve, the landscape description and the horse-riding action is good for readers of any age.  The rapid-fire cliffhangers that end each short chapter—one concludes with a character literally hanging off a cliff—and the somewhat silly dialogue are the parts that are specifically geared to young readers.  Poor Shane has to play up his part as a drawling cowboy, so he says “mebbe” instead of “maybe,” employs old-timey Western slang, and leaves the g’s off the end of his words. (As in this instance: “Don’t worry about that fool dog.  How are you feelin’?") At one point he tells the twins they have to watch out for gully washers.  “What’s a gully washer?” Liv earnestly asks him.

But that’s just an old scallywag book reviewer talkin’.  The Mystery Stallion is sure to please any girl in jodhpurs or Wranglers who has read her way through the horsy classics and is looking for something new.  The third book in the series, Heartbreak Hills, is due out in October.

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