The Littlest Racehorse — Juell Allan A

Late October, 1962.  The US and the Soviet Union stand toe to toe, poised to unleash their nuclear arsenals over the deployment of offensive missiles in Cuba - a mere 90 miles off the coast of Florida. This is the Cold War, suddenly too hot to touch. Apprehension flows relentlessly down the irrational corridors of chaos and panic - personal choices driven by the political realities of a world gone mad. A pair of kids, suddenly cast adrift by the week's escalating events, find themselves forced on a journey not of their own choosing - while the adults around them ponder the longest week of their lives. Forced to finally choose between the past and perhaps a very different future...one that seemed to share an improbable link to a young Thoroughbred horse, seemingly doomed by the peculiarities of his own birth. Lives that were stolen on a Thursday - and returned the following week. Irreversibly changed.

A. Allan Juell has been writing about horses and the people they own for over 35 years. His work has appeared in periodicals such as EQUUS, Chronicle of the Horse, Thoroughbred Times, Western Horsemen, Anvil Magazine and many others, both regional and international. He picked up a few obscure literary awards along the way, as well as copious amounts of...'enlightened' criticism. This is his second book. He published "Mares, Foals & Ferraris" (Dog Ear Publishing), in 2011. That book a serialization of columns first penned for the Washington Thoroughbred in the 1980's. During that period, he was both a Thoroughbred farm manager and a professional farrier, later practicing those skills in California and elsewhere. He holds a degree in history/international affairs, and currently resides in Port Orford, Oregon - though he has a propensity for extended walkabouts around the planet. His work appears regularly at horsetrionics.blogspot.com and histryonics.blogspot.com.