This is a book for older teen readers who love the outdoors and stories about people finding themselves. Sometimes you have to leave home to know who you are. WILD HORSE SUMMER begins in America, in the lush setting of Vermont, but the actual novel starts with Morgan landing in Devon. She’s been packed off to stay with relatives for the summer.

Morgan Taylor, an out-of-place teenager, carries many regrets, and she quickly burdens the reader. She got into top-end show jumping too young with a too-strict coach, and acted out in front of her mom and stepfather (a millionaire) when stress, social media bullying and peer pressure got too much. She has a gap in her memory following a terrible fire, and scars to prove it. There’s worse. This is a lot to throw at any reader in the early pages. To help overcome severe depression, Morgan is sent to stay with Aunt Thelma and her family in a coastal Exmoor village.

Exmoor is a wild, heathery, boggy, raised area in the south of England, where ponies graze, not much different to the original wild horses of Europe. The coastline is famous for surfing, and that’s where Morgan, in a wetsuit, meets surfer Cal Heyward. Callum is said to be the stereotypical ‘boy your parents warn you about ’, although I see little evidence of it. He’s got a responsible job as a junior journalist at a local paper edited by his mother, a former war correspondent. He’s dated various girls and is rumoured to have been in a fight outside a pub, which may have been self-defence. I’m not seeing the problem here, provided they are of similar age, which they are.

There are more stereotypes. When Morgan finally gets her act together and takes a job at a riding stable run by Pat Sharp, she is the only one to make a connection with a distressed, injured horse. When the stable needs to be saved, Morgan, the newcomer, steps up and offers to help, all the regular pupils apparently withering away in the sunlight.

Night Dancer is the fine Anglo-Arab horse Morgan learns to help and ride, his recovery paralleling her own. There’s also a wise little Exmoor Pony, Mouse, which is a star in his own way, knowing instinctively how to survive on the moorland. Lauren St John has previously written about a girl with an eventing horse, and the dramatic adventure WILD HORSE SUMMER broadens the outlook and includes social media. Puzzlingly, her character keeps picking up the wrong brush to groom her horse, but the author isn’t British, so maybe this is something lost in translation.