Well, perhaps the golden grove is not quite unleaving yet, but it is very autumnal, and autumn always feels like the real start of the New Year, even if it is the year dying with a dying fall. Alright, enough poetry quoting.

I have not updated for some weeks as I’ve been finishing the next book in the Breyer series: Samirah’s Ride: The Story of an Arabian, which will be published by Feiwel in Spring 2010. Meanwhile, Wild Blue got this nice review from TeensReadToo and both Breyer books, packaged with the models, were on QVC. I’ll try to post images of the models–which are beautiful–soon.

…and yet I need it on this page. Henry (and me) at Coney Island yesterday, before a rainstorm.

The place where I-I-I was born and raised

(Chorus: The place where sheeeee was born and raised)

I’m heading south tomorrow for BreyerFest! Can’t wait to say hello to the horses, real and plastic, and the people, small and grown-up. My reading times are posted to the right. 

(Song reference for the under-70 crowd: “Man of Constant Sorrow.”)

Thanks to my old employer–The Oxford American magazine–for these nice words (and the only time I’ll be compared to Patrick O’Brian) about my first book, A Horse of Her Own. “The Southern Magazine of Good Writing” is a worthy institution and has a beautiful new website definitely worth exploring.

Today’s Louisville Courier-Journal has this shoutout for the new books. The C-J did a nice interview with me last year, when A Horse of Her Own came out, that Tuesday’s Horse has kept online here.

I’m going down to Kentucky to help celebrate BreyerFest’s twentieth birthday and will be reading and signing Wild Blue and Little Prince, the first two books of the Breyer Horse Portrait Collection. Here’s a nice press release about the event, and I’ll post my reading schedule as soon as it’s finalized. On Sunday, July 19, I’ll also be reading at Joseph-Beth bookstore. 

I can’t wait to be back at the Kentucky Horse Park, where I really, really wanted to live when I was eight, and to meet all the Breyer fans!

It’s really wrong that that’s what I titled this post. Apologies and many thanks to School Library Journal for this wonderful review of Wild Blue:

A modern-day adventure that reads like an exuberant nature journal, this novel will grip readers from start to finish. Named because of her coat, which is “the color of rain, of water over rocks,” Blue lives with her family in a remote and rugged swath of Idaho wilderness where humans seldom venture. In fact, the very existence of the herd is only a legend among locals. When two ne’er-do-well cowboys capture Blue and her gentle half sister Doe, the mustangs are taken far from their herd and the freedom they’ve always known. Missing their family and not knowing anything about human ways (not even recognizing a rope), they encounter a range of human behavior after their first terrible experience. Blue ultimately escapes captivity and connects with a Nez Perce boy and his family, whose ancestors bred Appaloosas. Deftly and tenderly, without being overly sentimental, Wedekind describes the subtleties of horse instinct and communication. Horse fans and animal lovers will embrace this book with unbridled enthusiasm. It deserves a place next to Marguerite Henry or even Jack London on young readers’ bookshelves.–Madeline J. Bryant, Los Angeles Public Library

Bless you, Madeline J. Bryant, and all who sail in you.