Raised to take the place of her dead brother, Carlota de Zubaran can do anything Carlos could have done. She races her stallion through the California lowlands, dives into shark-infested waters searching for gold, and fights in the battles that rage between the Mexicans and the Americans. At 16 she is fearless - and that pleases her father very much.

O'Dell fingers the interesting tension when a parent molds a child more to his liking than the child's. In this novella, set in the days during the fight for control of California, Carlota is the daughter of a successful Californian rancher, who is treated as the replacement of a dead son. Who is Carlota? Is she a horsewoman? a warrior? brave or weak? compassionate or wise? Can she be all of these things? O'Dell captures Carlota's development just as she begins to understand who she really is and wants to be. Worthwhile reading.

When I was young I read an excerpt from this book in a magazine. It was so thrilling and exciting that I begged my mom to buy me the book so that I could find out what else happened in the exhilarating life of Carlota.

It turned out, that excerpt was the most exciting part, and the rest of the book was boring and disappointing. Oh well.

Have you ever dived for sunken treasure? Ridden in a horse race? Faced a hostile army? The main character of Carlota, an exciting adventure novel by Scott O’Dell, does all these things and more. Along the way, she discovers an important lesson about person courage. Carlota is about a young, headstrong woman named Carlota de Zubaran, who lives with her grandmother and her father on a large ranch in California. The novel is set in the last part of the 1848 war between the Unites States and Mexico. At that time, California was still a part of Mexico. Carlota’s family, whose Spanish ancestors settled in Mexico, is on the side of Mexico. Carlota is very suspenseful; it hols the reader’s interest. Carlota has many adventures and many close calls on her way to becoming her own person. To share in these adventures and to enjoy a good book, read Carlota. Holt, Rinehart and Winston's Elements of Language http://go.hrw.com/eolang/pdfs/ch6-5.pdf