Thunderhead

Here is a novel of growth out of conflict between self and circumstance. With the same extraordinary insight which distinguished her novel My Friend Flicka, Mary O'Hara has written a glowing story of a family's struggle for independent security. Readers who tingled to the excitement of Flicka will rejoice to know that the McLaughlins and the horses of Goose Bar Ranch are again the zestful personalities of Thunderhead.

Zestful the McLaughlins still are, but with this difference—the boys Ken and Howard are grappling with the problems of all adolescents. Nell and Rob are struggling against the desperation of straitened finances and personal misunderstanding.

When, out of the lovely mare, Flicka, comes the ugly, white throwback of a colt, Thunderhead, dismay is the McLaughlin's chief emotion. But Ken, his staunch and only defender, dreams of turning the colt into an incomparable race horse which will redeem the ranch and deck his mother in jewels. How the self-willed, fiery colt reacts to Ken's training, how he adventures into a far distant valley to encounter his fabulous grandsire, the Albino, and how, finally, he follows the call of the wild and teacher Ken to "take life straight" make a profoundly moving tale of the growth of a boy and his colt to maturity.

But Thunderhead is something more than the story of a boy and his horse and of the wild, mountain-rimmed country in which they live. It is the story of individuals who, although a close family unit, are still their own selves, filled with hopes and fears, the hurting frustrations, the conflicts and triumphs of life itself. Not Ken alone, but each of the McLaughlins longs for something he does not have and battles for it with full heart and aching mind. The clash of man's and woman's separate desires precipitates and nourishes estrangement and, in the end, gives the reader a seaching story of genuine love.

Whether writing of human beings or horses, Mary O'Hara has the special magic of understanding and dramatizing their innermost feelings in a way which brings both people and horses glowingly alive to the reader. And her prose sings and sours with a beauty and grandeur akin to the dazzling Neversummer mountains of the Goose Bar Ranch.