This is a story about a mare, but also about so much more. It is about women, motherhood, the desire—or inability—to have a child, and, above all, about love. The narrator finds herself approaching forty without children and without the possibility of having one. Then she meets a mare, and a deep love gradually develops between them. Through the animal, she reconnects with her own body, learns to give affection again, and finds a way to overcome fear. The questions the book raises are difficult and deeply personal: Is it possible to live a fulfilling life without children? Can love for an animal compensate for the love one might have for a child? Can that love be shared with children who are not our own? And how do you deal with a society—and with other people—who seem to think that a woman’s life can always be measured by whether or not she has children? Haworth-Booth explores these questions without anger or bitterness. Instead, the love she feels for the mare shines through every page, making me think that love for another living being can be just as profound and complete as the love for a child. I started this book thinking I had long since passed the age when I wanted to read books about horses, but this is more than a book about horses. I was completely drawn into it. A beautiful, thoughtful and deeply moving story.
“We have moved only a few times beyond the page of the school and up the farm path towards the woods. The horse moves with short, staccato steps, reflecting my uncertainty back to me. Her ears swivel and her head rotates, left, right, left, right, looking out, I can only assume, for danger, because this is the way I have always walked through the city alone at night. To be a horse, then, is something like being female. We move through the world the same way, with trepidation, ears straining for the sound of difference: snapping twigs, footsteps behind, the tremor of earth that suggests another body is moving quickly towards your own, through the bracken, the shadows. We know what it is to be prey.
If only one of us had the courage to persuade the other to keep going. But every time we stop before entering the stand of trees that leads to the forest, turn back.”