It's the morning of the Washita County Fair, and Raney hopes to win a prize for her home-baked biscuits. Sometimes talking to her horse, she'll remember past fairs and the fact that "for me and Old Thunder, there'd been no blue ribbons, not a one." Raney lists out all the county fair events she'd entered over the years, and remembers all the other local neighbors who eventually won them. It establishes the plot early - and signals that this will be a fun and folksy story.
"Why, fiddle-dee-dee! My recipe baking up right this minute was sure to yield the fluffiest, crustiest, sweetest-smelling biscuits ever..."
Unfortunately, Raney burns the biscuits - and then discovers she's out of flour when she tries to make another batch. Rushing in to town, all her neighbors warn her that there's a hail storm coming - or worse. But Old Thunder's hooves "went clop-clop-thunk-thunk, clop-clop-thunk-thunk, steady as you please, while those dark clouds rumbled in over our heads." Unfortunately, it's not a hail storm that's on the way - it's a tornado.
"Don't stop now," Raney shouts to her horse...
I like the way illustrator Kathryn Brown draws Raney's head and her horse's body as they swirl around the vortex of the tornado that snatches them up. And she sets the right tone for the story, using a gentle, faded watercolor to create a magically old-fashioned feeling for her pen and ink drawings of spunky Raney and her horse. There's old-fashioned buggies and lots of drawings of Raney's farm, and Brown's colors add to the mood, like when she draws pink in the grey sky behind the fields when the tornado passes by. She even draws yellowed photographs for the memories of past fairs. And of course, there's lots of scraggly hair on both the horse and its frazzled owner.
"Fiddle-dee-dee," says Raney, as the tornado passes by. The bag of flour slips away - but then, so do the prize-winning vegetables of fellow fair competitor (gobbled up by the prize-winning pig!) But wait - the bag of flour is hurtling down from the sky, "heading for the deepest puddle in the barnyard." Raney tells her horse to pull the buggy across the puddle, the flour is saved, and Raney bakes her biscuits after all!
I like the fact that this is apparently an old-fashioned legend that was handed down from one generation to the next. (Author Sharon Darrow based this book on a story told to her by her aunt, according to the book's jacket.) In the end, Miss Raney's biscuits now taste "airy and fresh as the fields in spring," and they even seem to float right out of the oven. And Miss Raney is so happy that she shares six biscuits with her horse, saying "you'll always be a prize winner to me."