Product Description

The first paperback edition of this popular story about the Big City and the Wild, Wild West.

The young heroine may live in a big city high rise block, but she just wants to be a cowgirl. With a little imagination, ordinary city objects become objects more suited to home on the ranch. A washing line is much better as a lasso, and Dad’s hat is a great cowboy hat once the rim has been rolled. It’s all much more fun than being a good girl, playing quiet games indoors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #781344 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-23
• Released on: 2003-10-23
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 11.37" h x .12" w x 8.62" l, .44 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 32 pages

From Amazon.com
Oh, give her a home where the buffalo roam... In this playful ode to the Wild West, a small girl would gladly exchange her big city life for big sky country. Her three-piece-suited daddy seems bemused by her longings, patiently trying to reclaim his converted hat and the white shag rug (with a suspicious chaps-shaped hole cut out of it). But "I don't want to be a girly girl / Who likes to sit and chat. / I just want to be a cowgirl, Daddy, / What's so wrong with that?"

As our heroine gallops through her urban landscape, the clouds reflect her fantasies: 10-gallon hats, cattle, cacti, and wagons. A stray dog becomes her piebald mare and two bananas are her six-shooters (her pet dog plays along in the holdup, paws held high under the ironing board where Daddy placidly irons his hat). Popular and talented author-illustrator team Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross salute big dreams in the warm, funny I Want to Be a Cowgirl. (Ages 4 to 8) --Emilie Coulter

From Publishers Weekly
In this pert, pint-size take on "Don't Fence Me In," a spunky narrator rejects being "a girly girl" and the cushy urban life in "our twenty-story flat" and tells her uptight, apparently single dad that she yearns for the Wild Wild West. Deceptively lighthearted ink-and-watercolor illustrations wryly follow the girl as she does her best to create a home on the range in the middle of the city: she cuts a pair of chaps out of the shag rug (her father's reaction is unrecorded, but a subsequent scene shows the rug inexpertly stitched back together), admires a Stetson at a boutique, serenades alley cats in the rain on her guitar, and imagines clouds as, variously, giant saguaros, cattle, wagons, etc. Humor abounds in the way the girl's fantasies unfold in the pictures, and the ending issues a playful exhortation to the girl's father: "Come and be a cowboy too!" Ages 4-8.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 2-A sulky city child doesn't want to be "a girly girl who likes to sit and chat" at pretend tea parties; nor does she want to be the kind of person who enjoys cleaning and cooking. She wants to be a cowgirl, as she makes clear on nearly every page: "Daddy, what's so wrong with that?" Dressed in a business suit, her father ponders his hat, which readers have seen on the girl's head in previous illustrations. Astride a pup and with a smile on her face, she dreams of breaking broncos; she wears chaps cut from the shag carpet; lounging on a rooftop, she envisions herself sleeping beneath a prairie moon. The child is so persistent that her dream becomes contagious and, on the last page, her father's button-down life flies away along with his coat, tie, and cell phone. It's a cowboy life for this pair now. Willis's rhyming text and Ross's jaunty, bright watercolors make it clear that readers should never give up hope for the lives they want.
Ruth Semrau, Upshur County Public Library, Gilmer, TX
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.