Velvet is a young Dominican girl from Brooklyn who enters the Fresh Air Fund program and is sent to upstate New York to holiday with Ginger and Paul, a white middle class couple. Whilst staying with them Velvet visits a local stable where she is discovered to be a naturally skilled horsewoman and forms a special bond with a damaged mare called Fugly Girl.
In essence The Mare is a standard coming of age tale as we see Velvet transform from a girl into a young woman and the difference that the connection with 'her horse' makes to her life, but in reality it is so much more. It tells the story of Ginger who struggles with her sobriety and life in a small town after living in NYC; the story of Ginger and Paul who become distant and argumentative as Ginger aligns herself with Velvet; the story Silvia and her jealousy of her daughter, Velvet. These are but a few threads in a richly woven tale.
Mary Gaitskill is one of my very favourite authors and she skillfully recounts the story in a burst of short chapters voiced by different characters in the novel.
There's a lot of difficult material here that the author handles with great care (race, poverty, teenage sexuality etc) and she authentically voices characters from a great diversity of backgrounds without overdoing the stereotypes associated with them.
Velvet is charming but she is also a difficult and willful child but I was so much on her side. I'm not a 'horsey' person but I found this book to be totally captivating.
I have only two criticisms: the book could have been somewhat shorter and I felt that the ending was left a little too open nevertheless I found it to be entrancing.
Recommended.
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