Carole, Stevie and Lisa have made big plans for the overnight campout for the students of Pine Hollow stables. When Stevie's parents refuse to pay unless she improves her grades, she decides to start hew own business and raise the money instead.

Grace is paired with Fancy, a Welsh pony, on her first horseback riding lesson, and even though Fancy is small, she and Grace learn how to ride together and compete in a race.

Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul, who wonder what it will mean to ?make a difference? in such a contrived situation. Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationship with Velvet over several years, as well as Velvet?s encounter with the horses at the stable down the road?especially...

"5 minutes a day is all the time you need to achieve: Better balance in the saddle, improved body control from head to toe, increased influence with your seat, flawless leg position and subtle aiding, quieter, softer hands and contact your horse can trust, less physical stiffness, tension, and riding-related pain, confidence in your ability to communicate with your horse! PLUS, in just 5 minutes you can improve a horse that's: unwilling to go forward...

Maggie Atwood and Becky McCabe, mother and daughter, both champion riders, vowed to never, ever, go up against one another. Until the tense, harrowing competitions leading to the Paris Olympics. Mother and daughter share a dream: to be the best horsewoman in the world.