Cowboy Boyd and Mighty Calliope
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
There's no other horse quite like Calliope. She's short. She's slow. She's lumpy. She's a rhinoceros. Still, Cowboy Boyd has a real strong belief in Calliope and her ability to help out the crew at the Double R Ranch. Boyd and Calliope try to prove themselves to the ranchers by rounding up strays and hauling posts, but it just doesn't look like it's going to work out. That is, until a storm drives all the cattle away from the ranch. They need someone real special to bring them back. . . .
Lisa Moser brings her trademark humor and strong structure to this smart and silly story of a cowboy and his beloved steed—a rhinoceros.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A horse is a horse, of course, except when it's a rhinoceros. That's the silly, unstated backstory in Moser's upbeat tale about a kind young cowboy's unwavering faith in his trusted mount. When Cowboy Boyd rides onto the Double R ranch atop his horned "horse," Calliope, the pair has everyone scratching their heads. Rancher Rose and ranch hands Slim and Hardtack agree that Calliope is the shortest, dustiest, and lumpiest horse they've ever seen she's also slow, clumsy, and unwittingly destructive. "I got a real strong belief in Calliope," Boyd maintains, and a crisis on the ranch gives Calliope a chance to prove she's worthy of such support. With easy-flowing dialogue and lots of onomatopoeia ("Calliope plodded to the pasture and... BLAM! Straight through the pasture fence"), Moser (Railroad Hank) plays Boyd's sweet naivet against the ranchers' deadpan expressions of concern to great humorous effect. Belgian illustrator Van Doninck, in his U.S. debut, contributes comic figures with long, rubbery limbs who mosey across mustard landscapes dotted with mesas and cacti, consistently keeping readers in on the joke of Calliope's lineage. Ages 3 7.
