The book I was reading this quarter was called “The Wild Heart,” by Helen Griffiths. The story happens in The Pampa, a place were many wild animals live in such as horses, birds, guanacos, and deers. Many gauchos traveled through its flat lands. In The Pampa there are seasons, thistles and beautiful flowers grow in the spring. It is surrounded by vegetation. The main character of the story is a mare called La Bruja, she is a wild horse. La Bruja lived in The Pampa, she had been through many seasons and loved to gallop, that was her ability, La Bruja was the fastest horse that had ever existed. In the story, she passes through many difficult situations but the most complicated is the fact that the gauchos wanted to capture her. The gauchos were people that were always aware of what happened in The Pampa. They liked to hunt animals and capture horses to domesticate them. The gauchos were La Brujas’s nightmare.
La Bruja had always lived as a free mare, she was happy and had been an independent horse. She did not like to be with a stallion that “took care of her”, she was strong and was capable on being on her own. One day, the gauchos appeared in The Pampa and decided to capture all of the horses that lived there; they started killing the ones they thought were useless to sell or to trade for other valuable things. La Bruja survives and escapes from them. Years pass and she continued to grow in The Pampa until men started searching for her again because they admired her speed, now they didn't care that she was ugly, they all wanted to domesticate her but she would always fight for her freedom so it was very difficult for them to capture her. The desire to be free was high that one time she killed a man called Gregorio that wanted to defeat her, to capture her. A man that loved her, called Angel, captured her once and left her alone in a stockade, he always wanted her to be free again but it was a dangerous thing because there was a chance that a bad gaucho would capture her again and he would not have her company anymore, but in the other hand, he felt sorry for letting her pass the rest of her life as a prisoner, so he decided to make her disabled to gallop so people would not want her anymore, (without her speed she was nothing special to a person), but let her free again in the solitary Pampa, because he loved La Bruja.
This book is worth reading because it is interesting how if focuses most of all in the perspective of a horse, how a horse relates to humans, how a horse lives, the struggles and the hard things that she needs to “defeat”. The theme of the story is: “Never give up if you want to achieve your goals.” For me, this is the theme of the story because I think the author did a great job showing the path of La Bruja’s life, her fight for freedom, she could have been taken by man many times and could have been hurt, but she fought until the end and never gave up in what she wanted. “Her life with Onak had made her restless, but at least with him she could run out her fever for freedom,” this is an example of the book that shows its theme. I think this book gives you a great life lesson, it teaches you in a great story the importance to keep fighting for your dreams, to accept tough situations but to not give up until you achieve them. I recommend this book to a person that likes adventure stories, that feels sadness, happiness, anger when they read those moments that are shocking, that when they are reading, they are in the book, in The Pampa with La Bruja. When they finish the book, they want to know more about what would happen next.
Book: "The Wild Heart"
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