The Suburban Frontier

Aldonza Krause is a superhero. She just doesn’t know it yet.
The seventeen-year-old, half-Angelo, half-Mexican high school junior has spent every summer on the family ranch in Mexico. Raised by rough and tumble vaqueros and uncles, she can take on any ranch job and possesses abundant outdoor skills. Her no-nonsense, practical-minded outlook perplexes many, and she has difficulties relating to some people. Capable and confident on the open range and in the wilderness, she finds herself mystified when it comes to the chaos of high school in suburban Houston, Texas.
To cope, Aldonza has gathered a “posse” of friends in an effort to achieve some stability, La Vaqueras. Influenced by the Vaqueras de las Cinco Manantiales —Ranch Girls of the Five Springs in Mexico, they are not just “cowgirls” of the dime store variety. The group lives by a motto, El Honor, la Tradición, la Lealtad—Honor, Tradition, Loyalty.
Anticipating an upcoming summer trip to Mexico, Aldonza has to deal with a science project gotten out of hand, a resentful popular diva who she almost drowned with in a flash flood, and any number angst-producing teen dramas that most teens handle with aplomb but Aldonza is just bewildered by. When the unexplained death of a horse causes her to be quarantined from her job, La Vaqueras uncovers a deadly conspiracy involving environmental pollution that could spell disaster for the open range she loves so well and the suburban jungle Aldonza is learning to navigate.