Such a beautifully written memoir about a woman you won't soon forget, and a horse who helped her in more ways than she could have imagined. Needing a change in life and always feeling most like herself on horseback, Lisa Stewart sets off on her horse, Chief, to regain her self worth, reclaim her identity and learn things about herself and the world around her. The result being The Big Quiet, a life-story that will leave the reader hopeful and hoping for a follow-up. Ms. Stewart's story is one that will resonate with everyone feeling that mid-life pull towards regaining their true identity. Thank you NetGalley for this lovely eCopy of a remarkable life.

The author gets to her 50s and turns away from a well paid job in the corporate world. She brings to life her dream of riding a horse across country and has a range of interesting and sometimes dangerous experiences along the way.
I asked myself what sort of person sets off on a long distance horse riding trek using a newly purchased trail horse. That question became an answer of sorts as I considered how many of us have done things which perhaps werent the best idea at the time. Also taking the opportunity to follow a dream does have a lot of benefits and I admired her courage and persistence.
What an accommodating husband the author has. I wish I knew a man like that!
I am an avid horse owner with a special interest in true life stories and thought this was an absolute gem! This book is perfect for horse lovers young and old as well as anyone who has a dream and needs a little encouragement to follow it.
I know the generosity and kindness of country people even when times are tough and it seems Americans are the same.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free digital advance reading copy in return for an honest review.

Amazing story! I didn't know there was a way to ride a horse across any place any more. Lucky woman! I;ve been giving some thought to taking a bike trip around the country for sometime. I remember back in the 1970's there were wagon train and horseback trips in various places. They ranged from 1 week to a few months. I haven't heard of any since. Well, we can live the trip vicariously with Lisa Stewart in this book. Wonderful!

A must read for any horse lovers. This heartwarming books follows the story of a woman setting out for a lengthy solo ride. Along the way she encounters challenges and learns lessons which everyone can relate to. Most likely to be loved by fellow horse enthusiasts but the story is strong enough that even those with limited attachment to horses or riding will still enjoy the read. Overall a beautiful book and one I will be recommending to all the animal lovers I know.

Lisa Stewart and her horse Chief leave their Kansas City home on foot to journey through Lisa's past in various parts of Missouri. Lisa and Chief bond with each other as they spend the next couple of months exploring Missouri's country roads. Chief has quite a personality (as horses do) and Lisa gets that across very well. Anyone who's ever had a horse know's every expression and movement she describes as Chief side-steps and cranes his neck at every evil guard rail and stares with wide eyes of anticipation at the odd mailbox that waits to leap out at him. Every late afternoon Lisa, or often Chief, chooses a driveway and asks about a nearby place that might let her camp and most often, as Lisa hopes, they say "camp right here" and then she and we get to learn all about the family living there. It was a pleasure to read all these little vignettes of people who fill a bucket of water for Chief or offer Lisa a place to stay. The thing that amazed me more than anything was the heat. I wilted just reading about the heat that Lisa and Chief dealt with on this ride. I wouldn't make in an hour on a 90 degree day. I think that this memoir would be especially pleasurable for people like me who, like Lisa, grew up mounting my horse bareback by grabbing his mane at the withers, swinging up and over onto his back and galloping bareback around the hills and neighborhoods of my childhood. Rest in peace Sunny...my old sorrel Belgian/Quarter Horse. I miss you. Thanks for the memories Lisa! #Netgalley #TheBigQuiet

Lisa Stewart’s The Big Quiet speaks to all of us who harbor in our hearts the memory of a child who loved, dreamed, wanted, cared for, learned from, and fed their soul on horses – imaginary or flesh and blood. I was certainly one, and I got my first horse, a brilliant and temperamental Anglo-Arab named Caleb, when I was the same age as Lisa. At fourteen, Caleb and I, with my friend Joy and her black mare, would take off for hours along the sandy roads of northwestern Michigan. We galloped bareback through the pines, our bare legs smeared with sweat and prickling horsehair. We scrambled down an old lumber rollaway and doused ourselves in the Big Sable River. I rode off and on for another forty-plus years – hunter-jumpers, eventing, dressage, and reschooling an off-the-track thoroughbred mare who hated racing (and me, I think). So I am likely a perfect reader for Stewart’s lyrical, observant, passionate memoir of the month she spent traversing rural miles of Kansas and Missouri with a volatile red horse named Chief.
Stewart is a horsewoman of exceptional knowledge and skill. She and her second husband ran a high-end, custom saddlemaking business for many years, and there’s not much she doesn’t know about a horse’s build, musculature, movement, and emotion – and a rider’s. She always dreamed of a trip alone, just her and her horse, solving problems, overcoming hardships, seeking joys and discoveries, exploring, wandering and pondering, reliant on only herself and her equine partner. She wants to try to find again that free-roaming, resourceful, brave child that she once was. With the support of her thoughtful third husband, she planned a 500-mile circuit to last 90 days, from Kansas City to circle through western Missouri and the country she grew up in.
It doesn’t quite work out that way. But it mostly does.
Each day’s routine is simple: ride the back roads, avoiding the highways and pavement when possible. As afternoon closes, she looks out for hospitable-looking farmsteads, rides up the drive and asks if she can water her horse. People say yes. Then she asks if they know anywhere she could stop for the night with her horse and pitch a tent. And most days, the homeowners say, “You can stay right here!” Most of these folks are older, farm people, who’ve raised cattle, ridden horses, and grown row-crops for generations. Wistful middle-aged women (Lisa herself is 54 at the time) say, “Oh, how I wish I could do what you’re doing!” Kids swarm around Chief’s hooves. She crashes birthday parties, chats with beefy men on riding mowers, and of course talks horses. She is friendly, unthreatening, undemanding, having an interesting adventure, and people warm to her. Not many ask her if she’s afraid, isn’t she worried about, well, something bad happening…? She chooses her stopovers, looking out for “happy/neat” homesteads of well-kept houses with flowers, decent vehicles, active farm equipment, and – preferably – horses or cattle on the premises. After all, she is a lone woman (though armed with her son’s Ruger) travelling the territory heartbreakingly written about by her friend, the fine “rural noir” writer Daniel Woodrell. But this is also her old home territory, and she is affectionate about this hot, sultry, garishly green, rambling land. She is comfortable with the connectivity of the people and the places, and feels her way back into her place in – or out of – it.
The days are long. She muses, she thinks, she talks to her horse, she pauses to scribble notes as Chief crops grass in a shady spot. There are rich descriptions of the country she is riding through: she knows the names of the flowers, the crops, the grasses, the kinds of hills and roads, what all the farm equipment does. There are wonderful observations: “…a gust of wind cuffed a stop sign… that twanged and quivered,” “a snake carved a wakeless S across the liquid silt.” The lilting sibilance of that snake sentence caught my breath. This adds up to a loving and attentive portrait of a particular American landscape. The people she meets are presented with respect and sincerity: how they dress (though perhaps we do not need to know exactly what every single person was wearing), what they say and how they say it, how they live and how hard they work. I did shudder at the woman who boasts about breeding Alaskan huskies and Australian shepherds and selling them online through a broker… Missouri, an epicenter for the atrocity of puppy mills, and it doesn’t appear to be on Stewart’s radar.
Any memoir carries the risk of becoming too focused on the writer, and Stewart avoids this trap with her resolutely outward gaze and finely tuned language. However, sometimes this can tip into something almost disingenuous: as she is trying to figure out her next day’s route, she suggests a road she could take, and the women she is with fall silent. Only then does she seem to realize that road will take her past the house where she lived with her first husband – who still lives there. Really? She didn’t notice that? One day, she finally rides by the house where she herself lived as a child… and chooses not to stop. Why? When one of the main points of this trip is to revisit that childhood of horses and no husbands and no children of her own to tend? She mentions her history with her second husband: a 3000-mile pack trip, her husband’s brain injury in a motorcycle accident, the shattering loss of her business, home and marriage – but with little detail or insight. To protect her ex’s privacy, perhaps, which is laudable, but it glosses over something deeply important. And after telling us so much about her golden childhood horse, Honey – how she looked, how she smelled, how she hugged her, how they barreled across Oklahoma winds and prairies – she describes (beautifully, and perfectly, as I know to my grief) Honey’s death in a single sentence, almost in passing.
Which brings me to Chief. I do know about difficult horses. Stewart buys this Missouri Fox Trotter horse eight weeks before setting out on her trip, from a horseman she knows well and trusts. He tells her several things about Chief, two of which are: do not give this horse grain, and the one time he dumped and bolted from his rider was when he saw horned bulls. Stewart herself describes the horse as a “twitchy explosives expert.” This is the horse she decides to ride off over hundreds of miles, alone? Yikes. And sure enough, barely into the trip, she has to pass a pasture full of horned cattle. He freaks, spins, she hits the gravel, and Chief bolts out of sight. She has to track him down, get the horse put up with a nearby farm, and get her husband to come take her to the local ER for a lot of stitching and bandaging a ravaged arm. Not a good beginning. I am curious as to why she as a writer describes this scene before she tells us that Chief’s previous owner had told her about the bull problem. So she knew. Chief melts down again near a convenience store where she has tied him to get something to eat and drink, and they have a “come to Jesus” moment in the street. It sort of helps. But there is always this worry: dogs, llamas, bulls, road signs, turkeys, slick pavement… this horse shies and spooks at everything. I suppose he is all she has in this moment, and she even says not long after that she had “[fallen] into mature love with him… right size, right bone, right hooves… right references.” And concludes with “every nerve a live wire.” I know what it is to love a horse, but to set off on this trip with this horse just felt foolhardy. There is a horribly dangerous bridge crossing, with planks missing and nowhere to go if a vehicle approaches. Stewart briefly considers the possibility of Chief’s putting a leg through a gap, but decides it’s too far to go around (after a lot of miles at a quick pace) and chances it, leading him across. They make it, but again: foolish risk? By the end of the journey, she tells of the grain Chief is getting… on one occasion, three times the normal ration. Granted, this travel requires hefty nutrition, but grain makes a horse “hot,” and Chief is plenty hot already… are we being set up for another catastrophe, when she knows better? Not here, but it’s unacknowledged.
At last, Stewart and Chief reach a dead end. She is deep in the Ozarks, and there are no open, gravel roads – only twisting, hilly, chip-sealed ones which are dangerously slick under steel horseshoes. She’s been away a month. There is no way around. She takes a wrong turn and can’t get across a highway. She decides to go home.
Lisa Stewart has acted out her dream. She shares her long, sweltering days, the fertile land and its people, her stormy partnership with her “Sweet-Person-Horse,” and bits of her own history. I would have liked more about some of her brief and acute observations: small towns that survived because they resisted school consolidation and kept their own schools alive; her approach / avoidance in talking about her own father (perhaps most movingly alluded to by quoting from Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays”). I loved the explanation of how roads in rural areas develop their own names (“Ball Diamond Road”) in defiance of how the gazetteer or Google Maps label them. There were some curious choices of timing, the order in which incidents were related or explained. The galley copy I reviewed had a handful of typos / misuses needing correction (levee / levy; peeling / pealing; tenet / tenant). I would have loved even a simple map of her route, to follow them along. Oh, and ticks. Having had a husband, a dog, and a friend’s horse all treated for Lyme disease (our poor dog was much the sickest, and the horse the most expensive), I would warn readers to pay much more attention to those evil little critters than Stewart does as she wears shorts and sandals to graze her horse in knee-high grass.
Fine writing, a good read, if imperfect in structure, and perhaps overendowed with pure description. But definitely a pleasure for its intended audience.

If you are a horse lover or rider (formerly or currently), you'll probably love this memoir. A grown woman carves out two months from her personal and professional life to do something she'd dreamed about since she was a child - a long, meandering horseback ride, solo, around two states. She's riding a new horse, purchased just for this ride, and encounters dozens of lessons and realizations every day. Horse people will know exactly what I mean. I felt like I was riding with her, doing and experiencing the same things. Her ride was blessed with wonderful human encounters and only one dicey one. I think I might have to go back and re-read it again because I didn't get enough second-hand riding in the first go round.

I have had the absolute pleasure reading this book and joining Lisa in the saddle as we travel through Kansas and Missouri in a long ride that you can tell has been a burning ambition by the author and a source of great fascination from the people she meets along the way.

First up, I need to disclose where I am with horses. I took up riding as a hobby, had a really bad fall and fractured a vertebrae in my back. I got on a horse one more time after that and my horse freaked, cantered, I stayed on but never rode again. I don’t particularly make a habit of reading equestrian stories, in fact it was the cover that attracted me to this book and before I knew it I was hooked.

So here I am with a book, about one woman, riding alone, just her and ‘Chief’, on another continent to me... and I just couldn’t put it down. This is a beautiful book. The intimate way we learn what Chief is thinking (he spooks quite easily), and the parts during the ride that Lisa shares information about her family and life that are so touching and interesting. And then there’s Lisa’s partner who joins her on Fridays with provisions and the bonus of a hot meal and a night in a motel. Not to mention the many families who offer her a safe pasture for Chief and somewhere for her to pitch her tent.

Read this book. Lose yourself in this story. You won’t regret it.

What a ride!

Thank you NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book. Lisa Stewart sets out on a solo “I-need-to-find-myself” journey, along with her horse, Chief. Reading this book brings you along not only for the ride, but for the thoughts and memories Lisa reveals, the lives of the people she meets and of course, Chief’s character. I am a city girl and have only experienced a speck of Lisa’s introspection process when hiking mountains. She is a deep thinker with a sense of humor and wonder. She is a wonderful writer and her descriptions are beautifully spread throughout. My only reservation about this book is that it could have been shorter. Of course everyone who lets her in to water her horse (and sometimes more) is unique, but not always different enough from another host to make it interesting reading. Also the details on what kind of road she is on (blacktop, gravel, etc) get a bit repetitive and monotonous. Repetition aside, this is a heartfelt book - recommended.

The author Lisa Stewart at the age of 54 , decided she would do a 500 mile ride from Kansas City to Bates and Vernon Counties in Missouri.
Leaving her husband for a few weeks as she rode around the state reminiscing about her youth,, businesses and reconnecting with her parents old ranch, where she grew up and the memories that came with it, from a past marriage and sometimes running into someone that knew her years ago.
She sets off on her fairly new horse, Chief, with hopes that she and her horse would get to know each other and their ways of communicating better along the way. They both had to figure out each others demands in order to have a successful ride, which turned out to be a learning process.
I loved hearing about her descriptions of the land and of the people she encountered along the way. I have never been to this part of the country so it was nice to hear about its landscapes, which I had though was pretty much flat open fields.
The people she met along the way were very welcoming of a stranger showing up at their door, when she would stop to ask for water for her horse or to ask if she might pitch her tent for the night and a safe place to put her horse.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Meadowlark, Independent Book Publishers for a copy of this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Independent Book Publishers Association for providing me with an e-arc!

This would be any horse lovers dream: to ride out on an adventure, just you and your horse and the whole wide world in front of you. The author, Lisa Stewart, did just that! This book follows her on her journey around Missouri, where she meets all kinds of people and finds herself.

We follow Lisa Stewart as she leaves home. We slowly get to know more about her and her horse. Their bond is obvious and it grows stronger every day. She is honest with her horse and gives him what he needs. On their journey they have to camp for the night along the way, causing them to meet a lot of different farm owners and other people. Lisa may have been afraid to ask for help at first, but she needn't have - most people turned out to be very friendly and helpful! This, together with the feeling of being alone, with your horse, out in nature, makes that the author finds back a piece of herself and trust in the world around her.

As I started reading this memoir, I found this is a very (rural) American book. The ease with which the author speaks of carrying a gun or the big role of different forms of Christianity gives an interesting insight to me. These are things I'm not familiar with at all. It's not what this book is about, but it was striking for me nonetheless.

I loved reading about the way Lisa handled her horse and cooperated with him, even though he might not always cooperate with her. It was also very nice to read about the way many people wanted to help Lisa and were very interested in her journey. This is a story of hope, gratitude and trust in humankind and it gets that message across very well.

By the end of the book though, it gets a little repetitive. All the different background stories of the people Lisa meets start to blend together a bit. I personally would have liked to read more about how all of this made Lisa feel, especially when she was alone on the road. She has been through a lot in her past and this affects who she is and how she reacts. She does mention her gratitude every time, but to me, all in all it misses a little depth.

The thing I missed most though... was pictures! Photographs! It would have added to the story to see some of the farms, the landscape and of course, her horse!

Still, this book is certainly worth a read if you like to read about a brave woman and her horse. It gives a good insight into rural Missouri and the helpfulness of people!