The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses
by Paul Goble
Summary
A girl who feels closer to the horses than to her own village people goes out with the rest of her camp on a hunt, and when a thunderstorm sends the horse herd stampeding she is thrown from her mount and carried off among them. A wild stallion takes her into his band rather than leaving her stranded on the plains, and she lives a full year running with the herd before hunters from her village find and recapture her. Taken home, she sickens with longing for the horses and nearly dies of it, and her parents, seeing what keeping her costs her, finally let her go back to the stallion for good. She returns each year afterward to visit her family, bringing a colt as a gift each time, until one year she stops coming at all; the hunters who go looking for her see only a mare running beside the stallion, and understand that she has become one of the horses she loved.
Paul Goble draws the story in flat, decorative panels outlined in fine white space, prairie flowers, birds, badgers, and grasshoppers filling in every unused corner of a page built around wide double spreads of running horses. The palette stays bright and clean rather than naturalistic, closer to Plains Indian ledger and hide painting than to a realistic wildlife book, and Goble lets a single herd of horses carry pages of pure motion with no dialogue slowing them down.
Read aloud, the book moves in about ten unhurried minutes, well suited to five through nine year olds who can sit with a story that ends in transformation rather than a tidy return home, and the ending's ambiguity, is the girl free or is she simply gone, tends to be the part children want to talk through afterward. Goble drew on his years studying Plains Indian art and story, and the book keeps the register of an origin story rather than an adventure with a moral spelled out at the end.
Historical Context & Significance
The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses won the 1979 Caldecott Medal, the year the two Honor Books were Donald Crews's Freight Train and Peter Parnall's The Way to Start a Day, the latter written by Byrd Baylor. Reviewers responded warmly to Goble's research into Plains Indian visual traditions; The Horn Book Magazine wrote that the story and art together conveyed a harmony with and love of nature it identified with Native American culture, and The New York Times praised the "energetic, hard edged dexterity" of Goble's panoramas.
Goble, an Englishman who moved to South Dakota's Black Hills in 1977 and grew close to the Oglala Lakota elder Edgar Red Cloud, spent most of the rest of his career retelling Plains Indian stories in this same flat, decorative style, and became a United States citizen in 1984. He kept illustrating tribal stories until his death in 2017, and this first book, the one that won him the medal, is still the one most readers meet first, later named to a millennium era list of the best children's books of the past hundred years.