Cowboy Up! Ride the Navajo Rodeo

Cowboy Up! Ride the Navajo Rodeo
by Nancy Bo Flood photographs by Jan Sonnenmair
WordSong, 2013. 40 pgs. Nonfiction

Rodeo on the Navajo Nation is the focus of this fine new book for kids, but its combination of poetry (left of the page), explanatory text and pictures (right side of the page) is evocative of the rodeo experience anywhere out West in the summertime. Bull riders, barrel racers, saddle bronc riders, steer wrestlers, and rodeo clowns fill these pages with the sights of a small but intense country rodeo, and the reader's mind fills in the smells and sounds: dirt and manure, cotton candy, Navajo fry bread, the smell of livestock and sweaty cowboys at the end of a hot day. In the beginning pages one young mutton buster breaks out of the chute with a look of sheer terror on his face, but he hangs on, waving his free arm all the way. Some fun in the desert Southwest.

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