Paint the Wind

Pam Muñoz Ryan's Paint the Wind is a horse story for 10 year olds about a lonely girl who has been kept away from everything her mother loved.

What happens

Maya is eleven. She lives with her grandmother in a house in Pasadena where everything is painted white, the sofas wear plastic covers and the socks are folded over exactly two inches. There's no playing and no fun. She's changed schools eight times because Grandmother doesn't like anything "frivolous".

Maya's mother is only allowed to exist in a shoebox hidden in the wardrobe. Inside are a set of worn toy horses that were hers and one photo of her laughing on a brown-and-white horse. Grandmother has cut her out of every other picture.

So Maya lies. She's very good at it. She has seen off a long line of housekeepers, and the newest one gets the sack after the garden furniture comes back painted bubblegum pink (you'll enjoy that bit).

Then Grandmother collapses at the breakfast table, and within a day Maya is on a plane to Wyoming. She's going to live with her mum's side of the family, including a grandfather she can't remember, on a ranch at seven thousand feet.

Running alongside Maya's chapters is a second story, told from inside a wild herd. Artemisia is a brown-and-white Paint mare, the lead mare of a small band out on the range, and she has just had a new foal. You get the stallion guarding them, the way the others let the little colt back into the group, and the danger of every gully. It's beautifully done, and you can tell the two stories are heading for each other.

It's worth knowing this one starts somewhere sad. Maya's parents died in an accident when she was five, and her grandmother dies of a stroke early in the book. The first horse chapter is a birth, described plainly, and mentions an earlier foal that didn't survive. A child who's lost someone close might find parts of it hard.

For a reader who adores horses and doesn't mind a book that makes them feel things, it's a real treat. The big burly grandfather who cries at the airport is especially lovely.

What to read next

If they're after another girl whose comfortable life is turned upside down, try Esperanza Rising. Esperanza has grown up on a grand ranch in Mexico where her papa teaches her to feel the land's heartbeat, until the evening he's late home and everything changes.