January 12, 2010
Shane’s Mane, a children’s story book released today by Pigeon Creek, is the first published book by new author Nicole Drumheller Gargus.
It is not, however, the author’s first appearance in a book. That happened when a story she had written appeared in a book by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund in 1998. More recently, one of her stories appeared in the 2008 Healing Project book Voices of Caregiving.
She has written countless stories for magazines and newspapers, nationally and in her local area. Gargus grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and earned degrees from Eastern University and Rosemont College, both just a few miles down the road from her home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
When she set out to write her first book, Gargus wanted to write “something that would inspire children to learn to read.” She turned to a subject that has been a source of inspiration for her throughout her life — horses.
Gargus’s own horse Shane appears in the title of her new book Shane’s Mane and in the photographs that illustrate the book. Gargus decided on the title after realizing that the horse in the story she had written had a character and personality that was similar to her own horse.
The book is illustrated with photographs, an unusual choice for a children’s story book, to make the story and the setting more real to the readers. Most of the photographs were taken on real horse farms in the Pennsylvania countryside.
Shane’s Mane is a story about a girl who gets her efforts to learn to read mixed up with her desire to ride a horse — with surprising results. Along the way, it explains about horses and life on a horse farm.