Customer Reviews

Paint The Wind

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I always enjoy a Pam Munoz Ryan book. Her novels make me hum with happiness and invite me to sit down for a cozy read. She also seems to write about things that I have a personal connection to.

The title, Paint the Wind, evokes the beloved, King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry and the book will have great appeal for those same horse loving book readers. The story opens as the mare, Artemisia, is about to give birth. Artemisia is worried about the baby as her last foal was stillborn.

The scene shifts to Pasadena, California where Maya lives with her stern and autocratic grandmother. Photos of her father abound throughout the house but all images and mentions of her mother are forbidden. Maya has only the haziest of memories of her early childhood but she treasures a box of plastic horses that belonged to her mother.

The grandmother's sudden death brings many things to light, including the news that Maya was supposed to have been spending her summers with her mother's family in Wyoming all these past years.

Emotionally withdrawn after her years with her grandmother, Maya has a hard time responding to the warmth and love of her grandfather, great-aunt and great-uncle when she arrives in Wyoming to live with them. Her keen interest in horses helps her find her place and even tolerate the hostility from her cousin, Payton. He is used to being the only kid at the family camp along the Sweetwater River during the summer. With the help of her Aunt Vi she begins to learn about her mother and family.

Maya's story is inter-cut with scenes of Artemisia, her colt and the rest of the herd. Maya and Aunt Vi see the herd captured in a "gathering" of wild mustangs but the mare and her colt evade the round-up. Without the protection of a stallion, the horses are vulnerable to attack from predators so Maya spends long hours in the saddle looking for them. When a disaster traps Maya in a remote area and she must win Artemisia's trust in order to survive and get home.

PMR tells the story in four parts, "Walk," "Jog," "Lope," and "Gallop" which match Maya's emotional growth and happiness. Parts of the storyline felt a little forced. I wondered why Maya's grandfather had never challenged the custody arrangements for his granddaughter.

This is a book for horse lovers. Fans of Terri Farley's books will be familiar with the controversial "gathering" of wild horses. There is a glossary and a list of websites, media, and books for readers who want to know more about the subject.

Paint the Wind celebrates swimming in a river, days of horseback riding, camp chores and caring for the horses -- a summer vacation that any horse loving kid would give their iPod and Playstation III to enjoy.

This is a beautifully written story that will capture your attention and your heart.
The author's style allows you to feel the relationships between all characters. Her descriptions of the elements and terraine allow you to visualize the story as if seeing it on film. When I finished the story, I felt as though I had seen the movie.

Pam Munoz Ryan is a wonderful writer. Her books are always beautifully constructed, carefully thought out and the language is rich and powerful. This book is no exception. Read it and you're in for a treat as sweet as a handful of molasses grain.

My 3rd grade daughter is a horse lover, and we were looking for a horse book that featured a girl when we found this one. We loved this story. I wasn't quite sure what the connection was with Artemesia at the beginning of the story. Maya's lying bothered me quite a bit as well. But I loved how it all turned out.

To my daughter it was just a neat story with horses and scary parts and a happy ending. To me it was a work of art, weaving life lessons and even great art into a beautiful tapestry.

My husband and I took turns reading it to our kids, age 6 and 8. We all enjoyed the story. The writing is quite nice, and the vocabularly is just right for an 8-year old, and OK for a 6-year old. There are quite a few "big" words that are good to explain to kids, but not so many that they can't understand the compelling story. I recommend it!

Eleven-year-old Maya has lived in the sterile and cheerless environment of her grandmother's regime for the past six years, ever since her parents died. And every single day she is reminded of her father's lost life by her grandmother who mourns his death with a crippling grief. Maya's mother, on the other hand, hovers only in the shadows of her memory, while her grandmother occasionally utters a horror or two about the woman who ruined his life.

Maya only has a faded photo of her mother astride a beautiful mustang horse and a few small horse figurines as remembrances. Maya must keep these items hidden from her grandmother or risk losing them forever. They are the only light she has left in an otherwise bleak and lonely life.

The household, which includes Maya, her grandmother and an ever-changing rotation of housekeepers, is void of laughter, joy, warmth or improprieties of any kind. Maya lives in a prison of prosperity, with a fancy house and an expensive education but no friends, freedoms or fairy tales. Maya's one treat every week is her trip to the library, where she devours books on horses. And though she knows all about the different breeds and interesting facts about them, she can't remember ever having met one face to face.

This all changes rather abruptly when Maya's grandmother suffers a massive stroke and dies. The lawyer shows up and announces that she will be living with her mother's family. He is shocked to find out that she hasn't been visiting that side of the family every summer as the courts had decided; her grandmother lied to them about shared custody.

All too soon, Maya finds herself on a plane bound for the wilds of Wyoming and the family horse ranch. She is torn, feeling curious about her mother's side of the family and nervous because of the off-color remarks from her grandmother. But what Maya discovers soars beyond her wildest dreams, and as she gets to know one of the wild mustang horses living near the camp, she finally begins to shed the prison walls installed by her grieving grandmother.

PAINT THE WIND is a beautifully written story filled with spirited characters and colorful descriptions of the amazing Wyoming landscape. Award-winning author Pam Munoz Ryan delightfully weaves two stories together --- that of strong-willed Maya, forced into hibernation and just begging to bloom, and the beautiful tobiano Paint horse, Artemisia, forced into isolation due to a wild horse roundup and desperate for love --- to create a charming novel.

--- Reviewed by Chris Shanley-Dillman, author of FINDING THE LIGHT and THE BLACK POND

Looking for a beautiful horse story? Look no further. Pam Munoz Ryan has written another lovely story with sharply-drawn, realistic characters who are deeply connected to the setting. It's about coming of age, finding your roots, learning when to let go. I think kids will love this book.

Paint the Wind features a young girl who has lost her parents and her primary caregiver, her paternal grandmother, before coming to live with her maternal family. Maya's grandmother was very protective to the point of sheltering her from the world. When she goes to live with her mom's family, she learns a whole new way of life, rides horses, and is caught in a survival situation in the woods after an earthquake. The story is fast paced at times, while also being slow and descriptive in places.

I learned so much about horseback riding by reading this book. Maya's bravery was amazing to me as I've just begun to ride horses again in the past year. It is a humbling experience and I am in awe of young children who ride with Maya's skill and grace. A look inside the training was very interesting.

In the classroom, I would share this book with any horse-lover. It would be a great book for adventerous young girls looking for survival stories with strong female characters. In addition, a study of earthquakes might occur as an offshoot of this reading. I would certainly show the location of the story on a map and investigate the earthquake history of the region.

"She dropped her head and licked the baby's damp and clotted fur, her tongue persuading him to breathe. At last, he twitched and stirred. The small body roused. The foal, who would become known as Klee, rolled onto his chest, lifted his heavy, wobbly head, and perked his ears. Minutes later, he stood but braced his front legs too far apart. He collapsed on the ground, limbs splayed like bird wings. Artemisia waited until he rose again, stiff-legged and tottering. She moved closer, extending her back legs and positioning herself so that Klee could suckle. He tried to nurse on the hock of one leg but Artemisia shifted away from his awkward attempt until he found a teat."

I'll never forget my surprise when, walking home from Commack High School North one afternoon, I encountered a horse standing in the small grassy backyard of our family's suburban Long Island home, craning its head over the fence and surveying my arrival.

It turned out to be but the latest highlight in my sister's love affair with Equus caballus.

It had been, perhaps, a half-dozen years earlier and maybe a dozen paces from where the young mare was standing that afternoon, that I had overheard a conversation in which my little sister was earnestly describing for the young girl next door all of the animals she would be accumulating someday after she'd purchased her horse and her farm.

"As Artemisia nestled close to her baby, she felt content and in no hurry to get back to the small band of horses. She welcomed this time, free from Sargent's constant scrutiny and her duties as lead mare. With Mary, she had stayed away for a week, enjoying the solitude with her new foal, until they were discovered by Sargent and herded back to his harem."

Other than some photos of our mother riding horses at a dude ranch in the Catskills in the days before she met our father, we had scarce few encounters with horses when we were young children. And it was I who was known in the family and beyond as the young book-a-day reader. But I unquestionably trace my sister's current living situation -- a farm and horses down in Costa Rica -- all the way back to her reading and re-reading of Marguerite Henry's MISTY OF CHINCOTEAGUE when she was a little girl.

And there is also no doubt in my mind that, decades from now, some guy will be tracing his little sister's lifelong love affair with horses back to her reading and re-reading the haunting, new, girl-and-a-horse tale, PAINT THE WIND by Pam Munoz Ryan.

" 'Maya, do you know anything about your mother's family?' "Maya searched her memory for the details Grandmother had told her and slowly nodded. 'My other grandmother died when my mother was really little. I have a grandfather and he lives with his brother and sister...but they're actually hillbillies with no education and they live like pigs in an uncivilized land. Oh, and they don't appreciate culture and are extremely crass and unsavory.' "

Eleven year-old Maya lost her parents in an accident six years earlier. She has since lived with her paternal grandmother in Pasadena, California amidst wealth, sterility, and somberness. It is clear that Grandmother blames her son's involvement with Maya's "wild" mother for his demise. Maya is not permitted amusement of any sort, has been shuffled from private school to private school, and has been required to adhere to a long list of harsh and unreasonable rules.

But when Grandmother dies suddenly and Grandmother's attorney discovers belatedly that Grandmother had simply ignored the dictate that Maya spend summers with her maternal relatives -- who run with horses amidst the wilds of Wyoming (when not teaching university classes or working as farriers or handymen) -- Maya finds herself on a plane on the way to meet these strangers of whom Grandmother had always spoken so disparagingly.

And what is certain from the first pages of the story is that Maya will somehow be crossing paths with the wild mare, Artemisia.

"Below them, the Honeycomb Buttes rose abruptly from the basin floor in peculiar sandstone spires of rust, brown, and green. In the east, Continental Peak saluted, and in the west, the Oregon Buttes lay like a sleeping giant."

Somehow, it doesn't matter that I've now lived in California for decades. With having spent a childhood and adolescence back East, where most "mountains" aren't much taller than the buildings in the City, it still kicks off that feeling of awe in me when an author like Pam Munoz Ryan writes of fording icy rivers and paints breathtaking pictures of horses running wild on high ridges.

PAINT THE WIND is a story that will surely trigger dreams amongst a multitude of young girls (and boys) of riding like the wind across endless, high plains.

I hate to say this, but this book is not well-written. The prose clunks; the characters are mostly one-dimensional; the horse-knowledge feels like the result of research, not lived experience; the riding lesson is unbelievable and dangerous. A good children's book takes kids a little beyond their natural range. This book hits all the notes that many kids will love, but does nothing to take them past where they are right now. Any compassion for the crazy grandmother? I didn't find it.