Wild and Wrangled officially released a couple of weeks ago and, as expected, I burned through it SO quickly (hard not to do when you're reading any of Lyla Sage's books, tbh).
You can find my full review of the book here if you're a StoryGraph user or here if you're on Goodreads.
For those who might not know me personally, I grew up on a cattle farm in rural Oklahoma. It wasn't exactly like the idyllic setting Lyla has created for us in Meadowlark, Wyoming (Oklahoma is a different kind of rural) but it was quiet, peaceful, had been in my family for generations, and at the end of the day, was not a bad place to spend the first 18 years of my life. But like any teenager on the cusp of adulthood who spent their entire first 18 years of life in the same small town, once I graduated high school, I bolted. Much like Dusty in Wild and Wrangled, it was important to me to gain insight to new places, things, and types of people—as you probably could have guessed, my little hometown was not exactly known for its culturally rich diversity. While I have learned since then that I'm simply not made to live in a town quite that small ever again, reading the Rebel Blue Ranch series over the past couple of years has reunited me with my love and appreciation for rural life and the people who exist in these spaces. Lyla pays such careful attention to making these characters feel like people you could easily become friends with and I've always admired her willingness to paint them in ways that make them seem a bit more... progressive (I think that's the word I'm looking for?) than a lot of people probably assume rural folks to be.
Not only does the ranch itself feel like home, but it's filled with people who go to great lengths to make it feel that way for everyone regardless of who they are or where they came from.
And I hope it's been that same safe space for you ❤️
Okay, enough of the waterworks!! A new Rebel Blue Ranch release for the shop has been in the works for a few months now, and I'm super excited to be releasing it on April 30th at 5pm CST. Since we've reached the last book in this small town romance series, I wanted this collection to be special and somewhat set apart from our last two Rebel Blue releases. With those, they didn't exactly feel like collections, per se, since they only consisted of one main item (although I did release a fun bookmark with one of them!). So for this one, I knew I wanted to add at least a couple more special items—I ended up landing on the "Clementine" Hair Claw and the "Cowboy Like Me" Charm Necklace.
The t-shirt is also something I am SO stoked about—especially since we find out in Wild and Wrangled that crimson was one of Meadowlark High School's colors and their mascot was a Mustang (and no, crazily enough, this was NOT planned and how wild is that?! Pun intended 😅)
Pretending I'm laying in a field in Meadowlark rather than a random hilltop in north Tulsa lol.
For all my bookish peeps who have come to love this cowboy romance series as much as I do, I hope you love this collection! Every piece we release at Next Chapter is special to me for different reasons, but the Rebel Blue designs we've released in the shop truly do stand out to me as some of the designs I've been most proud of. Here's to one last ride in Meadowlark (kind of—not really)...
