, Emily Haworth-Booth’s wonderful first novel for adults, is about a woman confronting three life-altering crises ... While Mare does become a story, its power is reliant on moments, thoughts, vignettes; on the everyday illuminated by the intensity of once-in-a-lifetime feeling. It is grand and particular; lovably modest and impressively profound. Readers may be reminded of animal memoirs such as Raising Hare and H Is for Hawk, but there is an uncertainty here that feels native to fiction.
This tender, gracious, and beautifully odd novel from graphic novelist and children’s author Haworth-Booth (The King Who Banned the Dark) is both an exploration of the vastness of human love and a wholly singular literary experience ... In disjointed yet compulsively readable paragraphs, with prose both fleeting and immersive, Haworth-Booth illuminates the most acute aspects of human love, motherhood, and care, all underpinned by an indulgent sense of strangeness.
The reader becomes immersed in the narrator’s internal world that Haworth-Booth conveys so skillfully. The rhythmic, poetic prose, though quiet and meditative, is simultaneously propulsive, such that the reader will grapple with the woman’s thoughts along with her ... Above everything is Haworth-Booth’s dramatization of the deep bond we humans share with other animals, which will leave readers pondering the question of what makes a family.
Some readers will find themselves wanting more from the fragmentary narrative, which often leaves thoughts half formed, but Haworth-Booth ably captures early middle-age disquiet and the soothing balm of animal companionship. Fans of Sheila Heti will appreciate this.
Haworth-Booth’s book is a marvelous exploration of what it means to be a woman, to live in a woman’s body, to contemplate motherhood—and it is equally about the relationships between people and animals, women and girls and horses. Every step of the way, she resists easy answers ... A lyrical, exquisitely detailed account of one woman’s inner and outer worlds.
