After her overprotective grandmother has a stroke, eleven-year-old Maya, an orphan, leaves her extremely restricted life in California to stay with her mother's family on a remote Wyoming ranch, where she discovers a love of horses and encounters Artemisia, a wild mare that her mother once rode.
First year camper Kianna Drake is technically too young to be a Pony Girl at Storm Cliff Stables, but in two days she will be officially eight and she is feeling homesick and a little left out, because the other Pony Girls do not seem to care.