14-year-old Mo Tamworth keeps up a tough front while hiding her despair about her disability. She is especially miserable about how she looks during the three swimming lessons a week that she must take for remedial exercise. When horseriding is suggested as an alternative, she is overjoyed. However, when Mo starts learning to ride, she is forced to confront her attitudes to imperfection -- both in herself and in others. In the process, she comes to the realisation that the world is not divided into "whole" and "deficient" but that all people have their own level of handicap and even bullies have their individual hells to live in. This story charts the development of a teenage girl from her fury about not living up to an ideal of beauty and her disgust with any deviation from that ideal, to the realisation that her feelings of personal worth should depend only on her certainty that she is trying as hard as she can, to be the best that she can be.