About the author
American author Amelia Elizabeth Walden (1909–2002) was born in New York City, and educated at Danbury State College. She taught English and Drama after graduating, and it was for drama groups that she first wrote. Her first book, Gateway (1946) she wrote because it was a good story, to find once she had finished it that it was aimed at the young adult market. This was the field she stayed in, and which she was anxious should carry on as an inspirational genre. She endowed the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award, which is given each year to “a book [in the United States] that exemplifies literary excellence, widespread appeal, and a positive approach to life in young adult literature.”
Finding the book
Three Loves Has Sandy is easier to find as it went into paperback. Palomino Girl is not impossible, but good copies with dustjackets might be hard to track down.
Links and sources
More on Amelia Elizabeth Walden’s books – very readable blog post by Staircase Wit on her teen books
The Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award
Terri Wear: Horse Stories: An Annotated Bibliography
Bibliography (horse books only)
Three Loves Has Sandy
Whittlesey House, New York, 1955, 160 pp.
Scholastic Book Services, New York, 1955 and later
Sandy’s first two loves are softball and horses, and then she meets Bill. Bill invites her to help him exercise a friend’s horses. Perhaps Bill might be Sandy’s third love.
Palomino Girl
The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1957, 175 pp.
Kit returns to Rutledge College for her senior year, in which she has lots of big decisions to make. She and her brother Cam have different ideas about what to do with the Star K Ranch which their ailing father can no longer run. She takes her palomino gelding, Gold Lightning to school with her, where she tries to forget the differences between her and Cam by riding and making new friends.