For Ages
10 to 99

Pie in the Sky is a part of the The Horses of Oak Valley Ranch collection.

Abby Lovitt doesn't realize how unprepared she is when she takes her beloved horse, True Blue, to a clinic led by the most famous equestrian anyone knows. The biggest surprise, though, is that Sophia, the girl who never makes a mistake, suddenly makes so many that she stops riding. Who will ride her horse? Abby's dad seems to think it will be Abby. Pie in the Sky is the most expensive horse Abby has ever ridden. But he is proud and irritable, and he takes Abby's attention away from the continuing mystery that is True Blue.

And then there's high school—Abby finds new friends, but also new challenges, and a larger world that sometimes seems strange and intimidating. She begins to wonder if there is another way to look at horses, people, and life itself.

Accompanied by the beautiful imagery of 1960s Northern California, Abby's charming mix of innocence and wisdom guide us through Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley's latest middle-grade horse novel.

An Excerpt fromPie in the Sky

Chapter 1
All summer long, Mom and Dad talked about the temperature. I would have thought that since they'd been living in California now for nine years, they would have gotten used to the weather, but no. It wasn't that they complained; it was that they were always amazed. Now it was fifty, now it was seventy, now it was a hundred, and all in the space of one day. In Oklahoma in the summer, it was always a hundred. That's what they said.
No matter how hot it was at our place (and yesterday it was a hundred), I knew to take a sweater when I went to the coast to teach Melinda Anniston and Ellen Leinsdorf, which I did every Saturday, even though my broken arm was healed and I had plenty of horses to ride. There were several reasons to go--Dad liked the income and experience for me, Mom liked the chance to do her shopping, and I liked both the girls and also their pony, Gallant Man, a pony that we had owned…

Under the Cover