Taken in by a heavily drinking artist and a jaded academic, a young Dominican girl in Brooklyn's Fresh Air Fund program explores the contrasts between her inner-city life and her hosts' privileged world and finds her realities powerfully shaped by her relationship with a horse. Reading-group guide available. By the author of Veronica.
Taken in by a near-alcoholic artist and a jaded academic, a young Dominican girl in Brooklyn's Fresh Air Fund program explores the contrasts between her inner-city life and her hosts' privileged world and finds her realities powerfully shaped by her relationship with a horse.
Taken in by a heavily drinking artist and a jaded academic, a young Dominican girl in Brooklyn's Fresh Air Fund program explores the contrasts between her inner-city life and her hosts' privileged world and finds her realities powerfully shaped by her relationship with a horse. Reading-group guide available. By the author of Veronica. Tour.
From the author of the National Book Awardnominated Veronica: Mary Gaitskills most poignant and powerful work yetthe story of a Dominican girl, the white woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her
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 couples changing relationship with Velvet over the course of several years, as well as Velvets powerful encounter with the horses at the stable down the road, as Gaitskill weaves together Velvets vital inner-city community and the privileged country world of Ginger and Paul. 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.
