Middle school aged horse loving girls will enjoy this story of a young girl as she begins working with her first horse. The story, also, contains the conflict between the wealthy girl from a broken family and the girl who is willing to work hard to get the horse she wants.

Annie has worked for 13 months at the Top Tier Stables, mucking stalls and caring for horses, to earn enough money to purchase her own horse. The day has finally come! Top Tier’s stable manager, Jack Manley, and Annie are at the horse sale in Colorado after the wild horse round-up by the United States government. Annie is now the proud owner of a 4 year old Buckskin Mustang. Back at Top Tier, Peggy- a young wealthy girl about Annie’s age, is riding her Olympic dressage champion Thoroughbred (Jinx) and talks down to Annie ordering her around. Annie is just happy to have her own horse which she has named Poco. “I brush the coat of a horse that has never before been brushed, Imagine that.” (23) Jack and Annie begin to slowly show Poco a saddle blanket and saddle so she does not get spooked. Jack makes it look so easy, but when Annie tries, everything goes wrong. They will need to start over again tomorrow rebuilding the trust between Poco and Annie. In the meantime, Jinx and Poco are stabled next to each other’s stalls. Jinx has never left any other horse in that stall alone before now. A few days later, Jinx goes missing. Peggy blames Poco for corrupting her horse by her wildness. As it turns out, the lock on Jinx’s stall was broken by someone. The girls won’t go home until Jinx is found. An unspoken truce is formed between the girls.  Annie is awakened by Poco’s neighing, in the middle of the night, when Jinx returns wounded and cornered by a wolf outside. Jack hits the wolf with a baseball bat getting it to leave.  Jinx needs 46 stitches, but the wound is not from the wolf. Badly needing sleep, Jack and Annie will watch the newly installed security camera footage tomorrow. The next day when Annie returns with her step-father to view the security tapes, they ‘smell smoke’. The barn is on fire! Annie runs into the barn freeing the horses closest to the fire first. Jack is having to come up with a new method for undoing the new lock on Jinx’s stall in a hurry. Jeff is taking the horses from Annie and putting them into outdoor paddocks. As the firefighters arrive and start putting water on the fire, there is no sign of Jack or Jinx. Then, the barn’s roof collapses! Were Jack and Jinx still inside? It turns out, Jack and Jinx made it out of the barn and into the paddock on the far side of Jack’s house. When Jack, Jeff, and Annie finally watch the surveillance tapes, they discover Peggy’s and her father’s body guard / chauffeur injured Jinx and let Jinx run off. As they watch even more of the tapes it shows the same man setting the barn on fire. With some detective work on Jeff’s part, the injured Jinx and later the fire was set to solve Peggy’s father’s ‘bad business decisions’ leading him towards bankruptcy. He was after the insurance money on the horse.  The book ends with a silver lining when an old friend of Jack’s comes to the burnt out Top Tier Stables with her large horse trailer offering to put up the twenty-five horses until the barn can be rebuilt.

There are two proof-reading errors. The first one is on the first page, line 3, the third word should be capitalized, since it is the first word of a sentence. The second error is grammatical on page 32, on the seventh line. The subject and predicate do not agree. It should read, ” She doesn’t resist when I…” not “She doesn’t resists when I…”