My Books

MY NEW BOOK

Big Guy: A School Horse Story

Big Guy: A School Horse Story is a middle-grade children’s novel. Big Guy faces big changes when his horse show career ends and he is moved to the school horse barn. The horse show circuit is the only life Big Guy has known. He will be used to teach inexperienced riders in a lesson program, and he sees this as a huge step down.

He has watched the school horses out in their pasture from his private paddock and thought that they looked a little rough, with whiskers on their muzzles and hair sticking out of their ears. They’re groomed but not to the sheen of a show horse. He wonders what it will feel like to have hair protruding from his ears, but this is the least of his problems.

Big Guy hasn’t been outside in a herd situation since he was very young and his social skills are found to be sadly lacking. He is beginning to get comfortable with his new friends and life as a school horse when it all falls apart.

Big Guy: A School Horse Story is about accepting changes, making new friends, and dealing with the curves life sends your way.

Augusta: A Novel

"A historically evocative period drama that’s poignant and disquieting.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the author of Walking Home: Trail Stories, a gold and silver winner in the 2022 Human Relations Indie Book Award, Celia Ryker’s fiction debut is based on the true story of her grandmother, a woman who endured abuse and poverty at the turn of the twentieth century.

The historical novel begins in 1906 on a rural farm in Arkansas, where Augusta was raised on a hard-knock farm and married off to the widowed father of one of her classmates at the age of thirteen. She and her husband flee the failed cotton crops for factory work in Detroit, and Augusta must navigate city life as a new mother. Abandoned by her second husband, Augusta works as a waitress, but with four children to provide for, she is forced into a decision that will haunt her forever.

See my reviews

Walking Home: Trail Stories

Trail Stories is about more than mud, sweat, and blisters while thru-hiking the Long Trail. Reminiscent of Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Ryker's mind wanders as her legs carry her forward, beyond a woodland path, to places and people she thought she had forgotten. Her grandmother's spirit appears on Mount Baker. A lost cousin waits for her at the bottom of every ladder. Her late father's words reverberate among the calls of barred owls. There were days when she didn't see another hiker, but she was never alone. Celia began writing about a difficult hike and ended up writing about the people who inspired her throughout her life. These are her "trail stories."

Buy my books: Barnes and Noble Amazon