Paint by Jennifer Dance

Title: Paint

Author: Jennifer Dance

Genre: Children’s Historical

Opens: …The mustangs were barely visible as they loped across the rolling plains, their multi-coloured spots and smudges melding with the earth and rocks, their streaming manes and tails masquerading as tall grasses blowing in the constant prairie breeze…

Blurb: The life story of a painted mustang set against the backdrop of America’s Great Plains in the late 1800s. A Lakota boy finds an orphaned mustang foal and brings her back to his family’s camp, naming her Paint for her black-and-white markings. Boy and horse soon become inseparable. Together they learn to hunt buffalo, their fear of the massive beasts tempered by a growing trust in each other. When the U.S. Cavalry attacks the camp, the pair is forced onto separate paths. Paint’s fate becomes entwined with that of settlers, who bring irreversible change to the grassland, setting the stage for environmental disaster. Bought and sold several times, Paint finally finds a home with English pioneers on the Canadian Prairie. With a great dust storm looming on the horizon, man and horse will need to work together if they hope to survive.

My Thoughts: The target age group for PAINT is 9-12; but I really enjoyed the story, and I certainly think that teens and adults will get a lot from this book. Set in the late 1800s in North America, it follows a little horse through a series of owners. Paint was rescued by a Lakota boy, Noisy Horse, after her injured mother is attacked by wolves. She is a smart little filly and learns very quickly what her role is going to be as she lives with the Lakota people learning to hunt buffalo; and also learning how to be a boss mare. Life seems good, but history has a habit of disturbing life, and the white man moved in without care or regard of the different tribal lands and traditions of their new land, which resulted in the Indigenous people being moved out – often forcibly with guns pointed at them. Paint is separated from Noisy Horse when the soldiers move in to take the Lakota people to a government run reservation. From here she runs through a series of owners and horse sellers, both good and bad, until she ends up with a pioneer family on the Canadian Prairie. Paint’s ultimate fate was a bit ambiguous as it wasn’t very clear to me what happened to her after the big climax – my guesses could go either way – but would have liked closure to that thread.

Paints isn’t the only point of view given – some of the other character’s give their points of view of the events and at the end Noisy Horse returns to his homeland with his granddaughter and tries to explain to her what happened and why remembering the events is important even though she didn’t experience them. He does this so that the people’s traditions can live on in memory if not practice, and maybe understand how their current lifestyle came about. Younger readers may struggle a bit with the last chapter, as it often comes across as a little bit of a sermon on the loss of rights, but is true and needs to be told.

Author, Jennifer Dance, is a very gifted story teller and her written descriptions of the land, the harshness of the pioneer life, and how in their ignorance the early pioneers destroyed the balance of nature resulting in huge natural disasters are so good that the events just come alive on the pages. People and animals die in the story – that is a harsh fact of life – and add long droughts, and endless blizzards and you get an inkling of what the pioneers went through to stay and survive.

It is so easy to tell that Jennifer did whole lot of meticulous research into the story. The world changing events that happened both to nature and the indigenous peoples in the lifetime of one horse makes the mind boggle.

At the very end of the story is an appendix with a historical timeline, glossary and more detail about some of the events mentioned during the story.

Last year I read Jennifer’s debut novel Red Wolf and it was one of my top 10 reads for 2014. PAINT doesn’t quite grab me the same way – but I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical novels, or are trying to explain that period of time to younger readers.

For more about the author – Click Here

C – Above average – was very readable and I really liked it but was easily able to put it down and walk away for a while.

With thanks to Dundurn Publishing Group and the author via Netgalley for my copy to read and review

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