The Spirit Keeper

12-year-old Katie is injured in an accident that kills her parents. Unsure that she'll ever walk again, she goes to live with her grandfather on a dairy farm in Kansas. It is a place so different from her city life, she has a hard time adjusting. Then a horse, a totem and Spirit Keeper, appears and gives her life focus. It also motivates her to move out of her passive role on the farm. At the same time, new people enter her life, role models who offer her possibilities she would never have considered in her old existence: becoming a trophy-winning barrel racer, and even becoming a shaman. On top of that, she discovers a 130-year-old family secret. With the help of Toby, her horse, she is able to heal not only herself but her entire family, including generations of Native Americans she didn't know were in her family tree. This story features a real horse. Although Katie and her story is fiction, Toby, the People's Horse, is real. His owners use Toby's stud fees, and now the profit from this book, to fund a nonprofit organization that gives money to the needy. Toby's agents true angels walking upon the earth spread out and let Toby's spirit guide them to people who have a need not always a need for money but a need to know there are people who care. Toby is truly a Spirit Keeper: a guide and role model for us all until we can find our own spirit and let it loose.