Search Results for: blog wild hearts cant be broken 1991

Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken (1991)

“Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken” is the movie I watch when I just want to sit, sigh, and let my heart get melted into a big squishy puddle. Sonora Webster (Gabrielle Anwar) is an orphan girl who lives with her sister in her aunt’s house. It’s the Great Depression, and there’s hardly enough food to go around. Sonora’s aunt makes her feel unwelcome, and Sonora has a dream: she’s going to run away and become a diving girl in a sideshow in Atlantic City. Diving girls leap onto the backs of moving horses and hang on tight while the horse … Continue reading →

Book Review: The Orphan Train Children: Will’s Choice

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The Orphan Train Children series, a spin-off of the Orphan Train Adventures Series, tells the story of children who were sent West on “orphan trains” to be fostered by townspeople. The children in this series are fictional; the orphan trains themselves are not. In Will’s Choice, twelve-year-old Will, whose mother died when he was four, travels with his father who works in a circus. When Will shows no signs of being talented enough to earn a living with the circus (okay, he’s rather clumsy), his father tells him that he has arranged for him to go “on a grand adventure”—to … Continue reading →

Book Review: The Orphan Train Children Series, Part One

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There are two new book series by prolific children’s author Joan Lowery Nixon. Two of the seven books in the Orphan Train Adventures series have won major awards. A spin-off series, Orphan Train Children, is a series of small books telling the individual stories of fictional children on the train. My first reaction upon seeing this series was, “oh, no”. A children’s book about abandoned children being put on a train, stood on platforms for townspeople to choose from, then being used for farm labor? Sure non-adopted kids might find this bit of history new and unusual, but won’t it … Continue reading →

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)

Our hero for this animated adventure is a horse who tells us his story with a small amount of narrative but mostly through action. He was born on the prairie at the time of the Old West and grew up with a close-knit herd, but one day he is separated from the group and is captured by the Army. Their methods of harnessing and transporting are pretty cruel, and the horse is roughed up by the time he arrives at the stockade. When he is shown to Colonel , the man in charge, the Colonel decides that the horse should … Continue reading →