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The timeless story of a girl and a horse is joined with the timeless story of people from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds trying to meet one another honestly in a novel that is raw, striking, and completely original.
Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist on the fringe of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Paul, an academic who wonders what it will mean to "make a difference" in such a contrived situation. The Mare illuminates the couple's changing relationship with Velvet over the course of several years, as well as Velvet's powerful encounter with the horses at the stable down the road, as Gaitskill weaves together Velvet's vital inner-city community and the privileged country world of Ginger and Paul.
"Starred Review. "Gaitskill explores the complexities of love (mares, meres…) to bring us a novel that gallops along like a bracing bareback ride on a powerful thoroughbred." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Gaitskill spares no one in this brutally honest story of poverty, bigotry, the secret life of adolescents looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong places, and parental and marital dysfunction. The major and minor voices narrating this brilliant tapestry are wondrously original, poignant, and, despite all, not without hope." - Library Journal
"In soaring language that well captures being "in the zone," whether it's painting or riding, Gaitskill brings home her theme of the importance of honoring one's gifts and the hard work of finding the best outlet for creative expression." - Booklist
"Gaitskill is renowned for her edgy writing, but the book - narrated by different characters - treads into stereotype. More nuanced portrayals might have made Velvet's bumpy growth into an independent young woman more palatable." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Mare was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Judy Axenson
Mary Gaitskills works include the Collection, Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998 and the novels, The Mare (2015), Bad Behavior (1988), Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), Veronica (2005), and Don't Cry (2009). Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). Her story "Secretary" was the basis for the film of the same name. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. She lives in New York.
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The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it
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