Gib Rides Home

Description for GIB RIDES HOME by Zilpha Keatley Snyder:

Eleven-year-old Gibson Whittaker has not know much comfort of kindness living at the Lovell House Home for Orphaned and Abandoned Boys. Gib's greatest wish, his "hope dream," is to belong to a real family. That's why he can't help being jealous when Georgie Olson gets adopted.

But this is the early 1900s, and not all adoptions are what they seem. Gib discovers that Georgie was really farmed out---sent to work on a ranch as unpaid labor until he's eighteen. When Gib himself is farmed out, he arrives at the home he's always dreamed of. He works hard and takes pride in how well he can "talk" to horses as he learns to be a wrangler. But this troubled family, full of tensions and secrets, is now that he had hoped for; and anyway, he's just a farm-out. Gib wonders whether he will ever truly belong anywhere.