The Mare
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Narrated by:
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Kyla Garcia
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Christa Lewis
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Sean Pratt
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Nicol Zanzarella
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By:
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Mary Gaitskill
About this listen
From the author of Veronica, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, comes Mary Gaitskill's most poignant and powerful work yet: the story of a Dominican girl, the white woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her.
Velveteen Vargas is an 11-year-old from Brooklyn who is granted a summer vacation in the country, courtesy of the nonprofit Fresh Air Fund. 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. Here we see the couple's changing relationship with Velvet over the course of several years as well as Velvet's powerful encounter with the horses at the stable down the road, as Gaitskill weaves together Velvet's 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 story of people from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds trying to meet one another honestly. It is a novel that is raw, striking, and completely original.
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Orange Mint and Honey
- By: Carleen Brice
- Narrated by: Cherise Booth
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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After grad school, Shay Dixon feels like she's had enough for awhile. Inspired by her spiritual adviser - a soul-soothing blues player named Nina Simon - Shay calls her estranged mother Nona for the first time in years, and shocks herself by asking if it would be okay to come home for a while.
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One For The Money
- By DiaRose on 09-25-17
By: Carleen Brice
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Tiger, Tiger
- A Memoir
- By: Margaux Fragoso
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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One summer day, Margaux Fragoso meets Peter Curran at the neighborhood swimming pool, and they begin to play. She is seven; he is 51. When Peter invites her and her mother to his house, the little girl finds a child’s paradise of exotic pets and an elaborate backyard garden. Her mother, beset by mental illness and overwhelmed by caring for Margaux, is grateful for the attention Peter lavishes on her, and he creates an imaginative universe for her, much as Lewis Carroll did for his real-life Alice.
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a weirdly loving diatribe against pervs.
- By Dane Flakeman on 05-21-11
By: Margaux Fragoso
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Kissing Games of the World
- By: Sandi Kahn Shelton
- Narrated by: Myra Platt
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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What if the one person you can't bear to be with is also the one person you can't bear to be without? Jamie McClintock is a free-spirited artist and single mother who has at last found peace and freedom sharing a farmhouse with an elderly man and his young grandson. But when the old man dies suddenly her idyllic country life comes to a halt as the old man's estranged son, Nate, returns to claim the house and his child.
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Great Writer, Great Narrator ! Loved it!
- By Ms. Critic on 05-30-09
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Fragile Beasts
- A Novel
- By: Tawni O'Dell
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Laural Merlington
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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When their hard-drinking but loving father dies in a car accident, teenage brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes face a bleak prospect: leaving their Pennsylvania hometown for an uncertain life in Arizona with the mother who ran out on them years ago. But in a strange twist of fate, their town's matriarch, an eccentric, wealthy old woman whose family once owned the county coal mines, hears the boys' story and takes them in.
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Tawni O'Dell Fan
- By bette on 09-20-10
By: Tawni O'Dell
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The Center of Everything
- By: Laura Moriarty
- Narrated by: Julie Dretzin
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Center of Everything is the fictional story of 10-year-old math prodigy Evelyn Bucknow. Living in Kansas with her single mother and deeply religious grandmother, Evelyn believes she is destined to marry Travis, the boy next door. But as she grows up, she experiences the heartbreak of a love not meant to be. Author Laura Moriarty was a recipient of the George Bennet Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy.
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not religious fiction
- By Theresa Jameson on 04-28-14
By: Laura Moriarty
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Dear Zoe
- A Novel
- By: Philip Beard
- Narrated by: Cassandra Morris
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Beard's stunning debut is an epistolary novel written from 15-year-old Tess DeNunzio to her little sister Zoe. After Zoe's accidental death on September 11, 2001, a day so many others died, Tess' family is numbed by their personal tragedy. Already acutely aware of her odd place in a home where her mother and stepfather now have children of their own, Tess begins her letter as a means of figuring out her own life, from her two-hour-a-day hair and makeup ritual to her complicity in Zoe's death.
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keeps you listening.
- By nas on 10-18-09
By: Philip Beard
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Love Letters to the Dead
- By: Ava Dellaira
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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It begins as an assignment for English class: Write a letter to a dead person. Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to the dead - to people like Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, Amelia Earhart, and Amy Winehouse - though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating the choppy waters of new friendships, learning to live with her splintering family, falling in love for the first time, and, most important, trying to grieve for May.
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Shining Depths; Unfortunate Shallows...
- By Gillian on 05-11-17
By: Ava Dellaira
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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This Raging Light
- By: Estelle Laure
- Narrated by: Sandy Rustin
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucille seems to have nothing going for her. With the bills piling in, the house falling apart around her, and her sister's growing distress, it is precisely the worst possible moment for Lucille to fall recklessly in love with her best friend's twin brother, Digby, who is practically engaged.
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Amazing Loving and Sexy
- By Princess Lucy on 12-28-17
By: Estelle Laure
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Kentucky Rich
- By: Fern Michaels
- Narrated by: Susie Berneis
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Josh Coleman left SunStar, the thoroughbred horse farm he'd built from nothing, unfinished when he took to his deathbed. But his family's unfinished business cannot be ignored now that his long-lost daughter has come back to settle an old score. No longer resembling the teenage waif who slipped away in the middle of the night with her illegitimate child 30 years ago, Nealy is rich, sophisticated, and renowned in the racing world-a woman to be reckoned with - and her shocking return changes everything.
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Don’t force reviews
- By Bev weaver on 05-24-21
By: Fern Michaels
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Feathers
- By: Jacqueline Woodson
- Narrated by: Sisi Aisha Johnson
- Length: 2 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Frannie doesn't know what to make of the poem she's reading in school. She hasn't thought much about hope. There are so many other things to think about. Each day, her friend Samantha seems a bit more "holy". And there is a new boy in class everyone is calling the Jesus Boy.
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National Treasure
- By Austin Jayhawk on 03-19-17
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Loving Day
- By: Mat Johnson
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention, he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter, and she thinks she's white.
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Teen lit with heavy erotic imagery
- By Itinerant T on 08-26-15
By: Mat Johnson
What listeners say about The Mare
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Pelican1021
- 04-15-16
Awesome
I love this book! The characters are so real that when the book ended I kept thinking about them and wondering what they were doing in their lives. I think that's the best compliment one can give an author when they create a world that so real we feel like we're missing out because we don't know what's happening in it.
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21 people found this helpful
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- Cassie
- 11-30-15
Wonderful
This was a beautifully written book. Narration superb. I do not usually write reviews but this was worth letting others know
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18 people found this helpful
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- Syd Young
- 02-29-16
Let the Mare Teach You
I actually really liked this book, even though I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I think the ending was just right.
The premise is that there is a program where inner city children get to go for a summer vacation with families who sign up. Of course, the child has problems (life) and the families (both) have problems (life). But the summer family lives next to a stable, and there is a horse that the girl is attracted to, the horse has the most problems of all. The Mare becomes her own character, and at times symbolizes all of the women in the story.
How can this possibly end good for this child? Well, it is not a perfect world, and there are no perfect answers, but sometimes there are perfect moments, and sometimes we can learn quite a bit about our sanctimonious ways by reading a novel. Well done.
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22 people found this helpful
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- julie beauchot
- 06-12-16
Not thrilled
This book was so-so, with a very unsatisfactory ending. The voice of ginger was so vapid and syrupy I could barely stand listening to it. And I like most things
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1 person found this helpful
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- Linda
- 06-27-16
Overall it was a good story.
Would you consider the audio edition of The Mare to be better than the print version?
I usually always enjoy the audio edition of a book more than the print version.
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
The author repeated herself way too often. Andn I found it made the character of Velvet unbelievable after a while -- she repeated her same thoughts over and over and she also changed her mind too many times, she and Ginger both. It became tiresome and predictable. In the end I was waiting for some action while they were forever going over and over what they should do.
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- Janet
- 11-20-15
Give These Characters a Swift Punch in the Face!
Any additional comments?
As someone who loved horse stories of all varieties as a kid, I was eager to listen to this retelling of "National Velvet." But the novel is a misstep. All of the characters were unpalatable, perhaps most so the heroine, Velvet, who is an unqualified brat.
That said, the book has its moments, and its narrators went above and beyond. They gave the book life, even if the author did not. The woman who read Ginger should get an award.
But unless you want to spend hours with your hands balled into fists, wishing you could punch characters who are infuriatingly obtuse, unthankful, or downright crazy, I'd suggest you stay away from this book.
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50 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-04-17
Have you ever wondered about the "other" people
What did you love best about The Mare?
I am an old curmudgeon. I have lived through many stages (including combat). I never, ever cry...not ever.
I cried listening to this book.
I am buying several copies to give away.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Mare?
there are too many to describe
Which character – as performed by the narrators – was your favorite?
Velvet
If you could take any character from The Mare out to dinner, who would it be and why?
Velvet. She could explain a lot to me.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jeff
- 08-18-16
Connections
This was a touching story about a young adolescent, inner city girl finding strength and connection in her relationship with a mare. Beautifully narrated, full of feeling, raw in its truthful depiction of life.
I highly recommend this book to all ages.
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1 person found this helpful
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- robert
- 03-16-16
Horse people should enjoy this.
The horse /human relationships are accurate. Interesting comparison of 2 different worlds and the power of the equine bond. Very well written, but I'm extremely disappointed in the ending.
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21 people found this helpful
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- Ginger
- 06-07-16
A story that encompasses much more then a Horse
The book kept my interest , however, I WAS UNCOMFORTABLE AT TIMES with the racial profiling, as I saw it. Perhaps, it was overdone, or I am overly intolerant of racial differences. The enemy in the story seemed to be the race of the girl in the story. Her neighborhood and school prove to be dangerous, but even more so, was her home life . When she was delivered through a fresh air program to a white town, things begin to go better for the girl, until the few white prejudiced people cause minor problems, but nothing compared to her mother who reaches out and brings her back to the inner city because of her distrust of the white people. Yet all of this is told as an underlying part of the story. Am I just a white person who doesn't want to acknowledge that these problems with racial differences still exist?
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1 person found this helpful