Follow the Dream: Nettie Moser’s dreams are coming true. She’s married to her cowboy, Jake, they have plans for a busy rodeo season, and she has a once in a lifetime opportunity to rodeo in London with the Tex Austin Wild West Troupe.
But life during the Great Depression brings unrelenting hardships and unexpected family responsibilities. Nettie must overcome challenges to her lifelong rodeo dreams, cope with personal tragedy, survive drought, and help Jake keep their horse herd from disaster.
Will these challenges break this strong woman?
This sequel to Cowgirl Dreams is based on the life of the author’s grandmother, a real Montana cowgirl.
Excerpt from Follow the Dream:
The sage-dusted countryside passed by in a blur as Nettie stared out the pickup window. Like the days of her life. All just a blur.
She ticked off the places they’d lived since she and Jake were married. Twenty-four times she’d picked up and moved since their honeymoon days on the Davis Place nearly fifteen years ago. Twenty-four times packing up their few belongings. They’d never really stayed anywhere long enough to accumulate much. Twenty-four times of setting up camp in a tent, squeezing into a hotel room, or cleaning a mouse-infested abandoned shack, even a granary, for heaven’s sake.
Moving around would’ve been different if they’d been part of the rodeo world. But that dream hadn’t come true. Then she’d settled for the one about having their own place. Someday. Always someday. Did other women have to endure this kind of life?
How she wished she could talk to Marie. Her friend’s words came back to her: Live your life, follow your dream.
Maybe she should go talk to Mama. No, she couldn’t run home to mother every time she felt blue. Then she remembered what Mama had said, not to give up on dreaming, but just allow another one to take the place of the one that was not to be.
She twisted the ring on her left hand. Jake was a good man, good-hearted, hardworking. He’d had his ambitions too, his visions blown away in the dust, swallowed by new-fangled machines, strangled by the death-throes of the only way of life they’d ever known. Easterners taking over farming, corporate ranches, machines making horses obsolete. What was to become of the life of the cowboy? Of Jake’s life? Selling their horses could be the last straw.
She and Jake used to have the same dream: rodeo. Nettie’s stomach knotted. That had been such a strong dream. Had she been clinging to that, even as she talked of focusing on a new dream, of having a place of her own? What do I really want?
A review of Follow the Dream:
In her poignant tale of Nettie Moser's diligent pursuit of a dream, Heidi Thomas gives a stunning example of what it means to "Cowgirl Up." FOLLOW THE DREAM is a dynamic story of a woman's strength and determination that is sure to inspire as well as entertain. —Sandi Ault, award-winning author of the WILD Mystery Series, including WILD INDIGO, WILD INFERNO, WILD SORROW and WILD PENANCE
Heidi’s books, Cowgirl Dreams and Follow the Dream are available, autographed, at http://www.heidimthomas.com They are also available as print and e-books through her publisher, Treble Heart Books, http://www.trebleheartbooks.com/SDHeidiThomas.html Follow the Dream is also out on Kindle.
Author Bio
Heidi M. Thomas grew up on a working ranch in eastern Montana. She had parents who taught her a love of books and a grandmother who rode bucking stock in rodeos. Describing herself as “born with ink in her veins,” Heidi followed her dream of writing with a journalism degree from the University of Montana and later turned to her first love, fiction, to write her grandmother’s story.
Heidi’s first novel, Cowgirl Dreams, has won an EPIC Award and the USA Book News Best Book Finalist award.
Follow the Dream is the second book in the “Dare to Dream” series about strong, independent Montana Women.
Heidi is a member of Women Writing the West, Skagit Valley Writers League, Skagit Women in Business, and the Northwest Independent Editors Guild. She is also a manuscript editor, and teaches memoir and fiction writing classes in the Pacific Northwest.
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