Paul Roberts is a teacher. He has a daughter, Edie, from his first marriage to Becca. He is now married to Ginger, a woman about a decade younger than his first wife. She has recovered from various problems with addiction. Ginger and Paul are childless. Believing they are too old to deal with an infant, they are considering the idea of adopting an older child. Ginger desperately wants to be a mother. To this end, they decide to try an experiment; for a few weeks in the summer, they take in a child from the Fresh Air Fund to see how it works out for them. |
Velveteen Vargas is of Dominican heritage. Her unhappy mother, Silvia Vargas, came to America to be married, but her plans did not work out. She was pregnant and alone in a strange country. The Vargas family lives in Brooklyn. Silvia never married and because of her disappointments she does not trust men or the world around her. Velvet lived in this world of limited opportunity and poverty with a mother who resented her presence in it, while at the same time, she feared for her safety as Velvet developed into a young lady. Silvia’s parenting skills left a lot to be desired. Coupled with her mom’s physical and verbal abuse, Velvet had to deal with the unsafe neighborhood and school environment where there were gangs and bullies. Velvet defied authority, did not follow rules and often broke them. Her school work was poor, although she was a bright young girl capable of doing better. In her neighborhood, it was an uphill battle to survive. She was not in a good place.
When 11 year old Velvet goes away for a few weeks in the summer, sponsored by the Fresh Air Fund, she is coupled with Ginger and Paul. She is sent from her urban nightmare to the bucolic world of upstate New York. The Roberts home is adjacent to a horse barn where she is introduced to their world. Ginger offers her the opportunity to take riding lessons, and in exchange for Velvet working there, cleaning stalls and grooming the horses, they begin. Velvet falls in love with a mare named Fiery/Fugly/Funny Girl, pretty much the most dangerous horse in the barn. You could say the two of them are known troublemakers. Both have been abused. The reader is given a window into her coming of age as the relationship between Ginger and Velvet develops in unexpected ways over the next couple or three years.
At times, it is hard to know who is being better served in the growing relationship between Ginger and Velvet, even as those around them seem to grow more distant. Both are troubled by their own thoughts, sometimes hopeful and sometimes envisioned in nightmares; their innermost thoughts are revealed as each event unfolds and they struggle with their personal realities. Ginger is obsessed with creating a better life for Velvet, sometimes losing perspective about who is the better parent, Silvia or Ginger.
As Velvet learns to redirect her anger and frustration, she seems to be able to communicate with the horses. Velvet is like a “horse whisperer” as she hears them talking to her, telling her how they feel, what they want, and what they need. She begins to have feelings of her own self-worth, formerly foreign to her. Her mom does not see her as worthwhile, but rather, she says she is bad like her father; in the world of the horses, however, people praise her and value her. Her growing knowledge of the horses’ behavior with human and animal plus her difficulties in learning how to deal with the others in the barn, actually help her to better understand her own behavior and the behavior of others. Even horses want to be appreciated and loved. As she tamed the horse she loved, she also tamed herself.
Silvia, Velvet, Paul, and Ginger narrate their own side of the story, and they often have contradictory views of the same situation. Each is flawed in some way, each is characterized by the secrets they keep and the lies they tell, lies of omission and outright lies. Velvet seemed to be a contradiction in terms at times, endowed with powers that seemed almost supernatural when it came to communicating with the horses. She often seemed older with regard to her attitude and views while at the same time she was woefully naïve. Both Ginger and Velvet are products of poor parenting, both have behavioral problems. Sometimes it was hard to determine “who was the adult in the room”!
Loyalty to family is a major theme with loyalty to wife, mother and friends questioned. This “fostering” experiment has great ramifications on all of their lives. The exposure to a different lifestyle, other than their own, causes conflict as they truly do not understand the plight each faces in their separate and vastly different worlds. Perhaps through each other they will learn how to love and respect each other and their differences or perhaps they will face conflicts they cannot resolve. The characters, searching for love and acceptance, sometimes did not know how to show love, but perhaps because they had been abused, they did not know how to accomplish that goal. They felt worthless and powerless because their dreams and plans had been thwarted by circumstances they submitted to willingly or by circumstances beyond their control over which they felt unable to resist.
I thought it was really interesting the way the author illustrated human nature by examining the way a horse is trained and reacts, by examining how Ginger, Velvet and others reacted in relationship to the animal world. Horses like people were capable of deception and affection. Cheating and lying were artifices in both the life of the adult and the child, and the reasons for their deceptions were examined as the book explored how they navigated their disparate worlds.
The personal political views of the author are presented in a rather negative representation of Republicans, at one point referring to them as greedy pigs. I do not think it was necessary to include those insulting views since they really lent little to the story other than, perhaps, to point out that most unsuccessful people are Democrats and most people who have succeeded are Republicans.