SOLVED. YA or Children's fiction book read in the late 70's or early 80's about a young girl and a horse named Riono. Her sister has died and she is struggling to come to terms. Spoiler. [s]

[Jimmie]

We find out immediately that her older sister has died and I think the horse named Riono was her older sister's horse but is now in her care. She was very jealouse of her sister (who could do no wrong) and has a general chip on her shoulder about seemingly everything.
SPOILER



The girl loves Astronomy and in particular the constellation Orion and she keeps remembering little by little, her sister telling her about how she came up with the name of the horse "Riono". Eventually she realizes that her sister rearranged the letter in her favorite constellation Orion for the name and then she starts to see that her sister did pay attention to her and I think it was her sister's plan from the beginning to give her the horse anyway.

[bookel]

Search engine
horse Riono
https://www.horseillustrated.com/hors...
Find Riono
The Stone Pony
By Patricia Calvert
JoBeth spends time with her late sister’s horse, Riono, and learns she and her sister weren’t as different as she thought.
The Stone Pony
Free to read https://openlibrary.org/search?q=Ston...

[Jimmie]

Solved. The Stone Pony by Patricia Calvert Thank You!

[Jimmie]

Funny how for 2 days I have been doing all manner of googling and even searching "horse" and "riono" to no avail and now it comes up. Guess my Google was broken.

[Kris]

Glad you found your book, Jimmie.

Because your book is old and might not have many reviews on Goodreads, one Google search that happens to work is searching Amazon's website. For example:

site:amazon.com book "horse" "riono"

[bookel]

All I did was search
horse Riono

Sometimes the simplest search works!