I’ve read a few Jennifer Dance books, and I can see that her goal is to teach lessons, about the environment, and about indigenous history, through the story. At times, however, those lessons are heavy handed, and glaring, and plunked into what is usually a really good story line.
That’s the case in this book too, which starts off about a Lakota boy who finds a horse in the wild. There are lessons about the arrival of the white man and what they did to indigenous people, but then Paint escapes, and for most of the rest of the book he becomes a rancher’s horse, then a homesteader’s horse, and then at the end the story returns to the Lakota boy, now an old man, who supplies another one of those heavy handed lectures about the struggles of indigenous people at the hands of white settlers.
I’m not saying those lessons don’t need to be taught , but this book doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be? Is it a book about how hard it was for pioneers to make their way in the new world, or is it a story about the changes forced on indigenous people? It tries to be both, but feels like many different stories linked by a horse named Paint.
I like aspects of Dance’s writing. I enjoyed the homesteader’s storyline best, as it reminded me a bit of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Little House on the Prairie, and like when she just tells a story, but the lessons are too obvious, and don’t fit well into the narrative.