The Horse That Haunts My Heart

Set against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, Deborah Smith Parker's coming of age memoir takes place in the 1950s during three transformative summers she spent on a horse ranch. As a young girl growing up in the Midwest, she longed for the life of a cowboy. At age 13 her parents allowed her to go west to live her dream where she met her first love—a horse nick-named Tank. She spent her summers riding, wrangling, and sleeping out under the stars while her extraordinary relationship with Tank developed, shaped by the poignancy, hilarity and drama that tested relationships undergo. Like the rugged mountains in which these events took place, this story has rapidly shifting light and shadow which Parker artfully leads the reader through with humor and well-wrought descriptions of vivid pictures of life on the ranch—daily chores, risky antics and real peril, coping with dirt and dangers on the trail, and learning the language of horses, her horse in particular.