Book Reviews
[An] 11-year-old Dominican-American...[girl from] Brooklyn is invited to spend a few weeks with a white couple in upstate New York.... Gaitskill is renowned for her edgy writing, but the book...treads into stereotype. More nuanced portrayals might have made Velvet’s bumpy growth into an independent young woman more palatable.
Publishers Weekly
(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. —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Gaitskill takes a premise that could have been preachy, sentimental, or simplistic—juxtaposing urban and rural, rich and poor, young and old, brown and white—and makes it candid and emotionally complex, spare, real, and deeply affecting. She explores the complexities of love (mares, mères...) to bring us a novel that gallops along like a bracing bareback ride on a powerful thoroughbred.”
Kirkus Reviews
Mare (Gaitskill) - Book Reviews
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