The Canyon Wren is the continuation and beautiful punchline of the full tale of Martín Prechtel's trilogy, The Story of My Horses, and picks up right where The Wild Rose leaves off.
The Wild Rose ends with the dramatic Barn Fire Incident in which the author and his steady new young Barb stallion, Punk, pull a flame stunned mare out of a burning barn just seconds before the whole burning structure collapses, then together they both drive straight out of that book and into a new life in the next book.
This third book in the trilogy brings the story far away from all those troubled times, ins and outs, and hardships and betrayals involved in the author's effort to gather up those old style Indian Ponies of his youth, and heads us back out into the wild land and the beauty of ranchito New Mexico, where as an integral part of the lives of his new family, their family herd of rare Spanish/Native New Mexico horses play out a series of unexpected peculiarities and surprising horse antics that push the envelope of what mainstream culture has come to assume defines horses and the people that have them.
If the first book, The Mare and the Mouse, is like finding a closed treasure chest, and the second book, The Wild Rose, is the retrieval of the lost keys to that chest, then The Canyon Wren is the treasure itself.
"If this book doesn't make you want to ride, talk to animals, eat well, and close the angry, slack-jaw and shamelessly jump up and try to kiss the sky, then I've failed, but I will always try again. Everyone wants life to be simple, but a simple life cannot be lived in a simple way: it takes a lot of simple skills. To see the humor and beauty in the world is one of those skills."
The vision in this book is simply beautiful.
