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One Trick Pony
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Expected 2 Mar 27Win a free print copy of this book!
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10 copies available
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A sweeping, gritty, sexy debut novel set in Wyoming that follows two families over more than a hundred years, telling a story of rodeo stars, roughnecks, and ranchers, along with the hard-drinking, hard-loving women who make their lives in a part of the west determined to break their hearts.
The brain in love is not to be trusted. August Sheehan knows that, but she’s still a teenage girl, drunk on love for the neighbor kid, leaving him notes snagged on the barbed wire fence between their properties. When a dust storm blows through, stranding August’s father in town, she finally lets George Mooney into her bed and wakes up with a gun in her face, betrayed for the oil claim beneath her family’s land.
So begins a rivalry between the Sheehan and Mooney families that will rip across their Wyoming properties for generations: from Mick Sheehan, a rodeo star who steals his best friend Ray Mooney’s girl, to Meg Sheehan and Brooke Mooney, close as sisters, running their ranches side-by-side, to Jessie Mooney, hired hand at a dude ranch that sells the cowboy experience to wealthy tourists, and far beyond, to an imagined future, where the last of the Sheehans lives on the desiccated wasteland of his ancestral Wyoming home, now a desert ruined by drilling and fracking, afraid his own heart might have dried up alongside the land, until hope arrives in a pickup truck.
As profound as it is uproariously profane, One Trick Pony is a Wyoming epic, a love letter and an elegy to a dying American landscape, written with the swagger, the grit, and the heart of a cowgirl.
The brain in love is not to be trusted. August Sheehan knows that, but she’s still a teenage girl, drunk on love for the neighbor kid, leaving him notes snagged on the barbed wire fence between their properties. When a dust storm blows through, stranding August’s father in town, she finally lets George Mooney into her bed and wakes up with a gun in her face, betrayed for the oil claim beneath her family’s land.
So begins a rivalry between the Sheehan and Mooney families that will rip across their Wyoming properties for generations: from Mick Sheehan, a rodeo star who steals his best friend Ray Mooney’s girl, to Meg Sheehan and Brooke Mooney, close as sisters, running their ranches side-by-side, to Jessie Mooney, hired hand at a dude ranch that sells the cowboy experience to wealthy tourists, and far beyond, to an imagined future, where the last of the Sheehans lives on the desiccated wasteland of his ancestral Wyoming home, now a desert ruined by drilling and fracking, afraid his own heart might have dried up alongside the land, until hope arrives in a pickup truck.
As profound as it is uproariously profane, One Trick Pony is a Wyoming epic, a love letter and an elegy to a dying American landscape, written with the swagger, the grit, and the heart of a cowgirl.
288 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication March 2, 2027
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I found this book surprisingly gripping - I say surprisingly because the premise and the writing weren't what I'd expected, but this has that certain something that made it work almost despite myself.
Organised as a series of fragments from the lives of two Wyoming ranch families from 1936 to 2048, these all hit the same beats without feeling repetitive: troubled sexual relationships and marriages; women reluctantly tied to domesticity and motherhood; grotesque happenings and violence; oil and money; cowboys and rodeo. The tone is hard to pin down at first: it's crude and gritty but then rises to something almost fable-like rather than strict realism: a girl who falls down a well and poisons the water; a rattlesnake on a baby's pillow; accidents, violence and bloodshed; heartless sex. There are strange images: a naked girl on a horse riding across the country; a two-headed lamb; the collapse of Wyoming towards the end as dust takes over the land.
I'm probably sounding a bit bemused and that sums up my experience of reading this. Is it a little confusing? Yes. Too long? Yes. Yet... yet.. yet there's something indefinable here that captured my interest and held it - tricky, indeed, but well worth reading.
Many thanks to Pan Macmillan/Mantle for an ARC via NetGalley
Organised as a series of fragments from the lives of two Wyoming ranch families from 1936 to 2048, these all hit the same beats without feeling repetitive: troubled sexual relationships and marriages; women reluctantly tied to domesticity and motherhood; grotesque happenings and violence; oil and money; cowboys and rodeo. The tone is hard to pin down at first: it's crude and gritty but then rises to something almost fable-like rather than strict realism: a girl who falls down a well and poisons the water; a rattlesnake on a baby's pillow; accidents, violence and bloodshed; heartless sex. There are strange images: a naked girl on a horse riding across the country; a two-headed lamb; the collapse of Wyoming towards the end as dust takes over the land.
I'm probably sounding a bit bemused and that sums up my experience of reading this. Is it a little confusing? Yes. Too long? Yes. Yet... yet.. yet there's something indefinable here that captured my interest and held it - tricky, indeed, but well worth reading.
Many thanks to Pan Macmillan/Mantle for an ARC via NetGalley
September 1, 2026
Starting in 1930s Wyoming, One Trick Pony initially follows August Sheehan, a 15-year-old rancher’s daughter scarred by a childhood accident. Her father’s ranch sits on oil that he has neither drilled nor sold, and from the outset it’s clear that there are people willing to kill for it.
The novel wastes absolutely no time establishing its particular brand of chaos. August loses her virginity to George Mooney, is subsequently held at gunpoint by George Mooney, ends up with the pistol herself, and takes off on a naked horseback pursuit through the Dust Bowl. Her horse breaks its leg, she walks home naked through the heat, finds a well, promptly falls into it and breaks her neck… and her decomposing body then contaminates the water, which Mooney later drinks and is poisoned by. 🤣
And that’s essentially your introduction.
The next section jumps to 1957 and another generation of the same two neighbouring families: the Sheehans and the Mooneys, whose love/hate relationship continues across the decades. Rather than following one conventional narrative, the novel is essentially a collection of interconnected stories centred on successive generations of these two families.
This book is unabashedly crude at times, which I have absolutely no issue with. Swearing is prolific, as are graphic descriptions of sex, violence and injury, while the episodes themselves range from darkly funny to completely bizarre.
Tonally, I found the first act strangely reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s adult short stories, albeit transplanted into the American West: macabre, funny and slightly grotesque, with the sense that things could go horribly wrong at any moment. Act Two gave me something closer to a very weird Demon Copperhead/Yellowstone crossover, while Act Three’s jump into the future, with climate-change-driven dust storms trapping its characters together, had shades of Interstellar with a touch of Passengers. 🤣
It’s ballsy, no-nonsense fiction that will particularly appeal to readers with a darker sense of humour, but there’s a surprising amount of emotional weight beneath all the absurdity. Towards the end of Act Two, something happened that genuinely had me holding my breath with anticipation. For all its weirdness, I became incredibly invested in these people.
I devoured the entire book in a single day. Enormous fun, frequently unhinged and unexpectedly moving… even if I was occasionally a little confused about exactly what sort of book I was reading.
Review of ARC provided by NetGalley and Pan MacMillan
The novel wastes absolutely no time establishing its particular brand of chaos. August loses her virginity to George Mooney, is subsequently held at gunpoint by George Mooney, ends up with the pistol herself, and takes off on a naked horseback pursuit through the Dust Bowl. Her horse breaks its leg, she walks home naked through the heat, finds a well, promptly falls into it and breaks her neck… and her decomposing body then contaminates the water, which Mooney later drinks and is poisoned by. 🤣
And that’s essentially your introduction.
The next section jumps to 1957 and another generation of the same two neighbouring families: the Sheehans and the Mooneys, whose love/hate relationship continues across the decades. Rather than following one conventional narrative, the novel is essentially a collection of interconnected stories centred on successive generations of these two families.
This book is unabashedly crude at times, which I have absolutely no issue with. Swearing is prolific, as are graphic descriptions of sex, violence and injury, while the episodes themselves range from darkly funny to completely bizarre.
Tonally, I found the first act strangely reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s adult short stories, albeit transplanted into the American West: macabre, funny and slightly grotesque, with the sense that things could go horribly wrong at any moment. Act Two gave me something closer to a very weird Demon Copperhead/Yellowstone crossover, while Act Three’s jump into the future, with climate-change-driven dust storms trapping its characters together, had shades of Interstellar with a touch of Passengers. 🤣
It’s ballsy, no-nonsense fiction that will particularly appeal to readers with a darker sense of humour, but there’s a surprising amount of emotional weight beneath all the absurdity. Towards the end of Act Two, something happened that genuinely had me holding my breath with anticipation. For all its weirdness, I became incredibly invested in these people.
I devoured the entire book in a single day. Enormous fun, frequently unhinged and unexpectedly moving… even if I was occasionally a little confused about exactly what sort of book I was reading.
Review of ARC provided by NetGalley and Pan MacMillan
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Man, I wanted to like this more than I did. I thought from the description it would be a book about two families sort of having a tit-for-tat revenge narrative going across generations—I would have been into a revenge story! Instead the whole “neighbor tries to steal the oil rights” premise isn’t successful and makes zero sense. Even if you kill the land owner, the oil rights are not yours. And why try to kill the daughter instead of the dad? And what is the daughter thinking and where is she even going when she runs off on a mule stark naked? How does that solve anything? Those are just the glaring plot holes in the first five pages. (The whole thing is full of glaring plot holes). The book moves across a chaotic, totally disjointed narrative where you’re cycling through characters who are supposed to be unique but all feel like the same bleak, jaded, cynical tribe.
Frankie Zwick seems to view the world as a place where real love and real kindness toward others is not possible. Everyone in the book is using one another or lying or cheating to get what they want, and the animal cruelty on top of all that just made the book unbearable.
I also have to agree with the other reviewer—given that Zwick is the daughter of a famous Hollywood filmmaker raised in LA, the whole cowboy narrative smacks of appropriation. I think readers crave authenticity and it just never sat right knowing a wealthy one percenter was writing in this affected twang and using words like “crick” for creek and trying to play blue-collar cowgirl. Also apparently her Harvard educated upbringing didn’t teach her how to write complete sentences? This whole book just feels like such a mess.
Frankie Zwick seems to view the world as a place where real love and real kindness toward others is not possible. Everyone in the book is using one another or lying or cheating to get what they want, and the animal cruelty on top of all that just made the book unbearable.
I also have to agree with the other reviewer—given that Zwick is the daughter of a famous Hollywood filmmaker raised in LA, the whole cowboy narrative smacks of appropriation. I think readers crave authenticity and it just never sat right knowing a wealthy one percenter was writing in this affected twang and using words like “crick” for creek and trying to play blue-collar cowgirl. Also apparently her Harvard educated upbringing didn’t teach her how to write complete sentences? This whole book just feels like such a mess.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Grateful for the early review copy of this Western. Concept was decent—the core idea of following two families had promise—but the execution was really lacking for me. The writing felt rushed and the leaps through time were jarring and disjointed. It felt like the book wanted to be about Meg and Brooke—I could see a novel centered on them succeeding better, with the other characters as backstory woven in. You could lop off the whole first third of the book and it wouldn’t even matter to the storyline. Why the author moved through time in such segmented bounds is confusing. It very much reads like a story collection.
I also just couldn’t get over the glaring hypocrisy of Frankie Zwick—raised in LA with famous celebrity Hollywood parents and Ivy League educated (she is the daughter of Academy-Award winning filmmaker Edward Zwick, and legacy attendee of Harvard)—trying to present as a gritty cowgirl. She tries to write from the POV of the working class and I honestly found it downright laughable. Zwick shows her hand time and again as someone trying desperately, but failing, to write an authentic rural experience. Ultimately, this book feels highly appropriated, like a rich person playing at working-class tourism and cosplaying Americana cowgirl, which is an increasingly problematic hobby of the wealthy class. That Zwick tries to take a stance on the rich rolling in, buying up ranchland, and ruining the west feels even more egregiously hypocritical given she’s a one percenter raised in LA’s wealthiest enclaves, and objectively one of the most privileged people in the world. Some of the sex scenes and “tough ranch life” scenes did make me lol though. They are so bizarre.
Finally, who advised on this title? A one trick pony is a pretender, someone lacking in range and authenticity and talent. So I guess, in the end, it’s fitting? A one trick kind of book.
I also just couldn’t get over the glaring hypocrisy of Frankie Zwick—raised in LA with famous celebrity Hollywood parents and Ivy League educated (she is the daughter of Academy-Award winning filmmaker Edward Zwick, and legacy attendee of Harvard)—trying to present as a gritty cowgirl. She tries to write from the POV of the working class and I honestly found it downright laughable. Zwick shows her hand time and again as someone trying desperately, but failing, to write an authentic rural experience. Ultimately, this book feels highly appropriated, like a rich person playing at working-class tourism and cosplaying Americana cowgirl, which is an increasingly problematic hobby of the wealthy class. That Zwick tries to take a stance on the rich rolling in, buying up ranchland, and ruining the west feels even more egregiously hypocritical given she’s a one percenter raised in LA’s wealthiest enclaves, and objectively one of the most privileged people in the world. Some of the sex scenes and “tough ranch life” scenes did make me lol though. They are so bizarre.
Finally, who advised on this title? A one trick pony is a pretender, someone lacking in range and authenticity and talent. So I guess, in the end, it’s fitting? A one trick kind of book.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Ed Zwick is one of my favorite filmmakers, so when I learned his daughter has a book coming out I was really excited. What I found instead was pretty disappointing, especially given the cultural clout bolstering this author. Her dad just published a memoir detailing his links to the likes of DiCaprio and Tom Cruise and Anne Hathaway. He’s currently shooting the adaptation of Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry. If you want literary and Hollywood connections, Frankie Zwick likely has them. Given all that, you would think her book would have solid storytelling in place. Not so.
Her “novel” is quite clearly a story collection. The stories lack in stakes, strain for believability, and the characters are one-dimensional and all seem like the same person. The whole book feels like it’s written in a flat, super hasty style. The pacing is breakneck; we blaze through huge chunks of time with whiplash. Even the landscape, the one steady factor, feels nondescript and underdeveloped. It all reads like a sketch to me, not a finished book.
It's also relentlessly dark. Two-headed sheep, horses beaten bloody with rifles, self-centered “friends” who sabotage one another, a cowboy who keeps a human appendage on their keychain, fifteen-year-old girls getting molested, mothers who throw their children into cactus and contemplate drowning them, babysitters who break a child’s neck. That’s the tip of the iceberg of the bleak content you’ll find in these pages and there’s not a single likable character in the book. It feels like it was written for pure shock factor, like someone punching you in the face just to get attention. I’m hugely bummed on the whole about this one, especially when I had every reason to want to be a fan of it.
Her “novel” is quite clearly a story collection. The stories lack in stakes, strain for believability, and the characters are one-dimensional and all seem like the same person. The whole book feels like it’s written in a flat, super hasty style. The pacing is breakneck; we blaze through huge chunks of time with whiplash. Even the landscape, the one steady factor, feels nondescript and underdeveloped. It all reads like a sketch to me, not a finished book.
It's also relentlessly dark. Two-headed sheep, horses beaten bloody with rifles, self-centered “friends” who sabotage one another, a cowboy who keeps a human appendage on their keychain, fifteen-year-old girls getting molested, mothers who throw their children into cactus and contemplate drowning them, babysitters who break a child’s neck. That’s the tip of the iceberg of the bleak content you’ll find in these pages and there’s not a single likable character in the book. It feels like it was written for pure shock factor, like someone punching you in the face just to get attention. I’m hugely bummed on the whole about this one, especially when I had every reason to want to be a fan of it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you Pan Macmillan, Mantle and NetGalley for the chance to read One Trick Pony before it's released! I don't think I've ever got whiplash so early in a book as I did with One Trick Pony. I was enthralled with the Sheehan and Mooney's from the first story and thought the story was going to go further than it did. Each chapter is about a specific character and early on there's not a lot of overlap, so I felt like some of the stories were over prematurely. I wanted a bit more detail or time spent.
Towards the middle of the book it stuck with the same few characters which meant there was more detail, but the constant jumping backwards and forwards in characters and time got a bit confusing and left me feeling disjointed. I was expecting this epic rivalry spanning 150 years and it got lost somewhere in the beginning chapters.
I was sold on the book from the blurb, but I don't think it's describing the same book which is a shame. I enjoyed the book overall, but I would have preferred less choppy chapters and a little more depth to each character. The latter chapters had big time jumps, and details I thought I had missed.
Towards the middle of the book it stuck with the same few characters which meant there was more detail, but the constant jumping backwards and forwards in characters and time got a bit confusing and left me feeling disjointed. I was expecting this epic rivalry spanning 150 years and it got lost somewhere in the beginning chapters.
I was sold on the book from the blurb, but I don't think it's describing the same book which is a shame. I enjoyed the book overall, but I would have preferred less choppy chapters and a little more depth to each character. The latter chapters had big time jumps, and details I thought I had missed.
September 7, 2026
Thank you NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for a free copy in the form of an ebook in exchange for my honest review.
I think part of my mixed feelings comes down to expectations set by the blurb. It reads like a rivalry story about the Sheehan and Mooney families and the betrayal over the oil claim. What it actually is, is a multigenerational saga spanning over a century, so if you’re expecting one continuous story with the characters you meet at the start, then don’t, as that is not what you get.
The beginning of the story was definitely atmospheric, but I feel like that got lost towards the middle and continued that way. As there are multiple characters, with some chapters covering the stories of two characters rather than one, it was confusing at times.
It’s one of those books that I read and already don’t remember what it was about.
I think part of my mixed feelings comes down to expectations set by the blurb. It reads like a rivalry story about the Sheehan and Mooney families and the betrayal over the oil claim. What it actually is, is a multigenerational saga spanning over a century, so if you’re expecting one continuous story with the characters you meet at the start, then don’t, as that is not what you get.
The beginning of the story was definitely atmospheric, but I feel like that got lost towards the middle and continued that way. As there are multiple characters, with some chapters covering the stories of two characters rather than one, it was confusing at times.
It’s one of those books that I read and already don’t remember what it was about.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I'm not sure why this is called a novel. It strongly reads like a story collection, and not a very good one at that. I found the writing to be hasty, lacking depth and even weirdly lacking sense of place, for a book ostensibly about place. Like where do the characters live? What do their houses look like? How big are these ranches? Just basic world building is not given to us. Only slice of life stories that jump in a really jarring way through time with a final swerve into an extreme Day After Tomorrow version of climate change that seemed poorly researched and leaned toward Hollywood type towering dust storms and end of the world survivalists (perhaps an influence of Zwick coming from a family of big name filmmakers). In the end this just felt like following a bunch of one-dimensional people drinking and cursing and behaving poorly—they all blurred together, and I never cared for any of them.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I loved One Trick Pony. I gobbled up its cinematic brilliance and the powerful way it explores the lives of women who have been wronged in almost every conceivable way by the men in their orbit.
I especially loved that the female friendships never slipped into a vapid We Are All Sisters version of solidarity. They felt complicated, imperfect and completely real.
The scope of the novel, moving between the past, present and future of the land and impact on the environment was superb and I hope when it's released, Frankie Zwick's novel goes absolutely stratospheric. Thank you to Pan Macmillan for the chance to read it early!
I especially loved that the female friendships never slipped into a vapid We Are All Sisters version of solidarity. They felt complicated, imperfect and completely real.
The scope of the novel, moving between the past, present and future of the land and impact on the environment was superb and I hope when it's released, Frankie Zwick's novel goes absolutely stratospheric. Thank you to Pan Macmillan for the chance to read it early!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
An epic and punchy debut that has the type of brutal depiction of life over the years in Pony that keeps you turning the page.
If you're looking for something no-nonsense that will keep you moving then Zwick's writing is for you.
I personally struggled as I felt the description offered for the book is not really what is within the pages and would have loved more time spent to learn the characters and more of their motivations and the cruelties of life in Pony.
Thanks to Pan Macmillan and Mantle for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
If you're looking for something no-nonsense that will keep you moving then Zwick's writing is for you.
I personally struggled as I felt the description offered for the book is not really what is within the pages and would have loved more time spent to learn the characters and more of their motivations and the cruelties of life in Pony.
Thanks to Pan Macmillan and Mantle for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
September 20, 2026
One Trick Pony grabbed me from the start. It's a Western, starting in the 1930s, with the story of a young girl, August Sheehan, then the story is handed off to the next character.
Each character through the 100+ year storyline is connected to those you've got to know previously, with stories being related and building through time and then connecting back in an unexpected way. Because of that, it makes it a really interesting read and you get to know the place, Pony, Wyoming, through the families that have lived there for generations.
It's a really original format that I haven't seen used previously. I haven't read many Westerns / cowgirl books before and this was my first by new author, Frankie Zwick. I would definitely read more by the author, and would be interested to see how the originality is leveraged in other novels.
Thanks to Frankie Zwick, Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.
Each character through the 100+ year storyline is connected to those you've got to know previously, with stories being related and building through time and then connecting back in an unexpected way. Because of that, it makes it a really interesting read and you get to know the place, Pony, Wyoming, through the families that have lived there for generations.
It's a really original format that I haven't seen used previously. I haven't read many Westerns / cowgirl books before and this was my first by new author, Frankie Zwick. I would definitely read more by the author, and would be interested to see how the originality is leveraged in other novels.
Thanks to Frankie Zwick, Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I did not like this novel.
The first chapter opened on a high, good pace, I thought it was setting the scene for fast paced rivalry between families.
But this isn't what I got - it slowed down to an almost unbearable pace, gave us a few throwaway stories to meld the years together. For me it was advertised as a story about family rivalries but it read more about oil mining and rodeo riders. I found it all really two dimensional. And the eco-horror at the end just felt really displaced? It was like two different books to be frank
Also, I find it quite strange that there was a listing on Goodreads with some negative reviews that has now disappeared...
The first chapter opened on a high, good pace, I thought it was setting the scene for fast paced rivalry between families.
But this isn't what I got - it slowed down to an almost unbearable pace, gave us a few throwaway stories to meld the years together. For me it was advertised as a story about family rivalries but it read more about oil mining and rodeo riders. I found it all really two dimensional. And the eco-horror at the end just felt really displaced? It was like two different books to be frank
Also, I find it quite strange that there was a listing on Goodreads with some negative reviews that has now disappeared...
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
"The desire for romance always just a little stronger than the instinct for self-preservation. The brain in love is not to be trusted..."
An intriguing debut novel with an unusual structure: moving through time from the 1930s to the 2050s. It's set in Wyoming in a world of rodeos and dust storms. It zips along at a fast pace, tossing wisecracks, aphorisms and heartbreaking observations to the reader along the way. I'll admit to finding 'One Trick Pony' a bit confusing - and at the same time, it had an energy about it which was engaging even when I had little idea how the pieces fitted together. I think this might appeal to fans of Darrow Farr's 'The Bombshell' and 'Yesteryear' by Caro Claire Burke.
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.
An intriguing debut novel with an unusual structure: moving through time from the 1930s to the 2050s. It's set in Wyoming in a world of rodeos and dust storms. It zips along at a fast pace, tossing wisecracks, aphorisms and heartbreaking observations to the reader along the way. I'll admit to finding 'One Trick Pony' a bit confusing - and at the same time, it had an energy about it which was engaging even when I had little idea how the pieces fitted together. I think this might appeal to fans of Darrow Farr's 'The Bombshell' and 'Yesteryear' by Caro Claire Burke.
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.
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