"The story of a girl, a wild mustang, and the courage to love the untamed ... "--Back cover.

The story of a girl, a wild mustang, and the courage to love the untamed . . . Katy has always been a dreamer, even when it gets her in trouble. At boarding school, she can't keep her mind off her mountain ranch and the horses her family raises there. Back home for the summer, she finds an unlikely friend in a wild horse, Flicka. But when her father forbids her to visit the dangerous mustang, Katy must choose between following her own instincts and keeping her father's trust.

Through her intense devotion to the wild colt Flicka, young Katy begins to learn about responsibility and gain a better understanding of her brusque father who forbids her to visit the dangerous mustang. Original.

For much of the 20th century, books for children encouraged girls to be weak, submissive, and fearful. This book discusses such traits, both blatantly and subtly reinforced, in many of the most popular works of the period. Quoting a wide variety of passages, O'Keefe illustrates the typical behaviour of fictional girls – many of whom were passive and immobile while others were actually invalids. They all engaged in approved girlish activities: deferred to elders, observed the priorities, and, in the end, accepted conventional suitors. Even feisty tomboys, like Jo in Little Women, eventually gave up on their dreams and their independence. The discussion is interlaced with moments from the author's own childhood that suggest how her developing self-interacted with these stories. She and her contemporaries, trying to reconcile their conservative reading with the changing world around them, learned ambivalence rather than confidence. Good Girl Messages also includes a discussion of books read by boys, who were depicted as purposeful, daring, and dominating.

"In the Heart of a Mustang is one of the finest books ever written for teens and preteens." Literary Classics. In the Heart of a Mustang has been selected as the 2016 Gold Medal winner of the Literary Classics award for Young Adult General Fiction and is a Silver Medal Award Winner from the Nautilus Book Awards. In the Heart of a Mustang has also been awarded the 2017 Silver Medal from the Readers Favorite International Book Awards for Young Adult Fiction. A boy is told that his father was a brave and virtuous man, a soldier who traded his life to save the lives of countless others. He was the man that Hunter needed to emulate. The only problem is the whole story is a lie, all of it. The truth, which Hunter discovers as he begins his sophomore year of high school, is that his father has actually spent the boy's entire life in jail, paying his debt to society, but not mending his ways. A wild mustang mare, is rounded up by the BLM. The spring rains had been sparse, the forage on the plains even more so. The mare and her herd are rescued from certain starvation and placed for adoption. In a sandy corral at Promise Ranch, a home for troubled teenage boys, the boy and the mare meet. A weathered, old cowboy brings them together - a mentor for one, a trainer for the other. The bond that forms between boy and horse becomes one that saves the lives of both.