Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dude, That's Rude! (Get Some Manners) by Pamela Espeland & Elizabeth Verdick

If there's one book today's kids need to read, it is Dude, That's Rude! (Get Some Manners) . The authors provide a fun format for teaching etiquette to children. They discuss proper behavior at home, at school, at other people's homes and in public places. The information is completely up-to-date with cellphone manners and netiquette included. Fun, cartoony illustrations are on practically every page giving the book great visual appeal. This book is perfect for boys and girls in the fourth grade or older. WARNING: Bodily functions are discussed.

Faces of the Moon by Bob Crelin

Faces of the Moon by Bob Crelin Illustrated by Leslie Evans Charlesburg; 2009; unpaged Faces of the Moon is a short nonfiction book that describes the different phases of the moon and why the moon appears like it does on certain nights. This book is short and sweet so even the youngest of moon lovers will enjoy it. The layout is simplistic and easy to follow. I don’t know much about the moon so I found it very interesting.

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...