Paint the Wind -- Pam Munoz Ryan

Maya lives a solitary life with her elderly grandmother who feels most things eleven-year olds like to do are a waste of time. Maya’s one outing, besides school, is her weekly, hour-long, chaperoned visit to the library. Maya is forbidden from even mentioning her own mother’s name because her grandmother blames her mother’s love of horses for the death of both Maya’s mother and father. But when Maya’s grandmother dies unexpectedly, Maya is sent to live with her mother’s family in Wyoming, people she has not seen in six years. As Maya adjusts to her new life and her new freedoms in the open range of Wyoming where her family spends its summers camping and watching wild horses, Maya comes to understand her mother’s love for horses and she is able to identify with the wild horses’ need to be free.

This easy-to-read book is poignant and touching and leaves the reader with an uplifted feeling. Interspersed with chapters seen from one of the wild horse’s perspective, it offers the reader a chance to change perspectives and experiment with seeing situations in a different and completely new way, allowing his or her imagination to run wild.