It's 1895 and fourteen year old Hannah Brandt struggles with the hard life on a Nebraska homestead. When her imagination is captured by a wild filly, she becomes obsessed with horses, which opens the door to her destiny. Just four years later she enters the first Cheyenne Frontier Day rodeo where she wins a relay race. Emboldened by her success, she adopts a new name, Sunny Gale, and pursues a rodeo career, much to the displeasure of her very proper mother and her young husband. Sunny defies convention with every move as the drive to compete takes over her life, leaving everything else behind, including husbands and children. Despite heartbreaks in and out of arena, she will not compromise on her quest for glory, nor will she bow to the expectations for a woman in her time.

Award winning author Jamie Lisa Forbes once again brings us complex characters in a story based on real women and the early days of professional rodeo, one of the few outlets at the turn of the twentieth century where ordinary women could become stars.

Jamie Lisa Forbes was raised on a ranch in the Little Laramie Valley near Laramie, Wyoming. She attended the University of Colorado where she obtained degrees in English and philosophy. After fourteen months living in Israel, she returned to her family's ranch where she lived for another fifteen years.In 1994, she moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. In 2001, she graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law and began her North Carolina law practice. Forbes' first novel of life in the rural West, Unbroken, won the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction in 2011. Her collection of short stories, The Widow Smalls and Other Stories, won the High Plains Book Awards for a short story collection in 2015.Forbes' novel of rural North Carolina in the segregation era, entitled Eden, was published in 2020. Her historical novel about women bronc riders in the early days of rodeo, entitled Sunny Gale, A Novel was published in May 2024 by Pronghorn Press. Sunny Gale--A Novel has received the following accolades: 2025 Will Rogers Silver Medallion--historical fiction category; 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist--historical fiction category; 2025 Feathered Quill Book Award Finalist--women's fiction category; Listed in Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Books of 2024; Kirkus Reviews starred review. Ms. Forbes continues to live-and write-in North Carolina.