MARE

Quietly, painstakingly, a woman begins to care for a horse.

“Horses had moved into my consciousness slowly and then quickly, gathering pace and rhythm and volume,” says the narrator of Haworth-Booth’s first novel for adults. Like her author, the narrator writes children’s books and, from her home in a sleepy part of England, teaches writing online. She’s married but her husband, also unnamed, plays little role here. At first that seems counterintuitive, since the narrator’s central struggle—whether or not to have children—would very much seem to involve him. But Haworth-Booth’s focus isn’t on a couple’s shared decision; it’s on women’s bodies and women’s choices and what happens when what we thought was a choice is suddenly circumscribed. For many reasons—climate change and environmental catastrophe not least among them—the narrator has long thought she didn’t want to have children. As the book progresses, she finds out that, in any case, she can’t. Her body undergoes mysterious changes; there are doctor visits, estrogen patches and creams. Does womanhood hinge on the ability to give birth? If the book were content with questions like these it would be on rich enough ground, but Haworth-Booth complicates things infinitely—and exquisitely—by marching horses into the mix. The narrator becomes a “sharer” in a horse’s care: Several days a week, she feeds, brushes, and rides the horse who is, for all intents and purposes—and for a fee—hers on those specific days. Lest you suspect Haworth-Booth of facile comparisons, the horse is not a surrogate for a child. “I didn’t know how to describe who the horse and I were to each other…” the narrator says, mystified herself. “What is between the horse and me is inexpressible but not insignificant.” 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.