I’m no hippophile, but I was captivated by the subject matter: a famous antebellum champion thoroughbred and his talented, enslaved groomer.
Three intertwined stories across three eras:
1850s Kentucky. The heart of the story, and the most fascinating and enjoyable. Brooks is a skillful researcher, an important talent for good historical fiction, and her love of horses comes through in the details. There’s more about horses than horseracing, but there are some exceptions (p.40):
‘All men are equal on the turf or under it’—that’s the saying. But the folk who own the horses, it’s much more, for them, than an exciting day out. Here’s the ground of it, as I see it: a racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there. He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman. A gentleman likes to have a horse that gives the right answers to those questions, then he can believe that he will give the right answers too. To do my part, I have to give a man a likeness that shows not just how beautiful the horse looks, but how beautiful it feels to him.
1950s NYC. I’m pretty neutral on the story about Martha Jackson, New York gallery owner and connoisseur. It had its interesting bits, but the connections back to Lexington were a reach.
2019 Washington D.C. The Theo/Jess part. Certainly the cringiest part of the book…the on-the-nose wokeness is a little hard to take, and then some of the “modern” dialogue is cheesy (p.266):
The hours are crazy, but the lab’s sick. Anything I want—mass spec, cryo-EM, Illumina sequencer—I just ask and boom, it’s there. Bright shiny everything. But I literally step over people sleeping in the street to get into the place. The homelessness here is epic.
It was ambitious to try to tie all of it together, and you’ve got to hand it to Brooks for her attempt, but some of it didn’t quite land for me—although it seems based on reviews that I’m the outlier.
I don’t mean to be too down on it, though. Even if it doesn’t make the Favourites list, I’m still glad I picked it up.
— ᴘ. ᴍ. ʙ.
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