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126 reviews for:
The Sport of Kings: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017
C.E. Morgan
3.52 AVERAGE
126 reviews for:
The Sport of Kings: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017
C.E. Morgan
3.52 AVERAGE
Wow. Beautiful, powerful. Felt like a dark version of Steinbeck with a little Shakespeare thrown in. Best book this year.
Read because: 2017 finalist for Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction
This story is…
....masterfully written.
....going to piss a lot of people off.
….a book that white people go nuts over, hailing it as literary genius as it deftly and sometimes graphically shows all the horrible things white privilege does to both white people and black. Feel sorry for us white folk, trying so hard to get woke with little to no success.
….not going to escape the criticisms heaped upon [b:The Help|4667024|The Help|Kathryn Stockett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1346100365s/4667024.jpg|4717423] and [b:The Secret Life of Bees|37435|The Secret Life of Bees|Sue Monk Kidd|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473454532s/37435.jpg|3275013].
….not as horse-laden as one may have been lead to believe (thank goodness, I was dreading that part).
…intentionally pretentious.
….long, long-winded, and just super long. Have I mentioned how very long this is? It's long.
....a sweeping family saga in the American South but not gothic. Well, maybe a smidgen gothic.
As for the audiobook, I don’t think I liked having a white guy narrating this. In a strange turn of opinions, I would have preferred this to be read by a cast, not a single narrator. I suppose this narrator could have kept Henry Forge's parts but he mispronounces words and he doesn’t have the right accents so, maybe not.
I'm not saying the narrator is bad. He'd be great for other books. I just didn't like him for this one.
So this book has some problems. It's long (I may have mentioned that already), it's written with so much arrogance but, then, that seems to have been the point. It's trite but the cliches, themselves, are symbols. It's offensive but not unrealistic. Except for when it is unrealistic and then it's a different kind of offensive.
I actually enjoyed the story a great deal and I appreciated the over-the-top writing and the self-indulgent moments of author speaking to herself. I liked the overall framework and the tidy tying-up of loose ends.
But I didn't love any of it. It's ponderous, I wanted it to be done already, and the things I mentioned liking above were also awfully irritating.
This isn't a beach read. Well, I mean, of course you can read this on a beach if you want. But it takes some concentration so if you are at the beach with people who will demand your attention, probably read something lighter and easier to follow and save this one for when you have vast swaths of alone time on hand.
This story is…
....masterfully written.
....going to piss a lot of people off.
….a book that white people go nuts over, hailing it as literary genius as it deftly and sometimes graphically shows all the horrible things white privilege does to both white people and black. Feel sorry for us white folk, trying so hard to get woke with little to no success.
….not going to escape the criticisms heaped upon [b:The Help|4667024|The Help|Kathryn Stockett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1346100365s/4667024.jpg|4717423] and [b:The Secret Life of Bees|37435|The Secret Life of Bees|Sue Monk Kidd|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473454532s/37435.jpg|3275013].
….not as horse-laden as one may have been lead to believe (thank goodness, I was dreading that part).
…intentionally pretentious.
….long, long-winded, and just super long. Have I mentioned how very long this is? It's long.
....a sweeping family saga in the American South but not gothic. Well, maybe a smidgen gothic.
As for the audiobook, I don’t think I liked having a white guy narrating this. In a strange turn of opinions, I would have preferred this to be read by a cast, not a single narrator. I suppose this narrator could have kept Henry Forge's parts but he mispronounces words and he doesn’t have the right accents so, maybe not.
I'm not saying the narrator is bad. He'd be great for other books. I just didn't like him for this one.
So this book has some problems. It's long (I may have mentioned that already), it's written with so much arrogance but, then, that seems to have been the point. It's trite but the cliches, themselves, are symbols. It's offensive but not unrealistic. Except for when it is unrealistic and then it's a different kind of offensive.
I actually enjoyed the story a great deal and I appreciated the over-the-top writing and the self-indulgent moments of author speaking to herself. I liked the overall framework and the tidy tying-up of loose ends.
But I didn't love any of it. It's ponderous, I wanted it to be done already, and the things I mentioned liking above were also awfully irritating.
This isn't a beach read. Well, I mean, of course you can read this on a beach if you want. But it takes some concentration so if you are at the beach with people who will demand your attention, probably read something lighter and easier to follow and save this one for when you have vast swaths of alone time on hand.
Fucking 17 hours of my life spent listening to this one only to pull of my headphones and scream at the end of chapter 4.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Medical content, Medical trauma, Pregnancy
Moderate: Confinement
"We can snatch from the air the abstractness of numbers, adding and subtracting and making logic from magic, and because we can, we do, and we must. ... We can, from the chaos of existence, extract meanings, which do not exist. We can make ourselves philosophers and scientists and priests. We can construct our unnatural civilizations--we can, and therefore we must."
"A short time ago he'd admired northing better than the old picker he'd chased alongside. But he could see now that all these machines ran out of an obligation that was man-made; a thing without a will could run, but never race."
"What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetuated on women and designed to further men's lives at the expense of their own."
"She thought soon all the land would sound like nothing, and no one would know it had once made sounds, that small civilizations had thrived in the grass. It would never register with life again. And what was coming? Concrete. Glassed fronts and sale signs and cash registers. And with it all, people in a torrential surge, carnivorous men and women looking to smear their skin with colors and creams, to bleach their hair, to shave their hides, to cinch themselves breathless in order to think themselves beautiful."
"Nobody talks about a suicide; it grinds generations into the soil of time. That kind of dying tells a tale bigger than one man, and people ought to talk about the how and the why."
" '. . . We live in a consumptive world, where we consume more food than we need, where animals are forced to consume our cast-off poisons and the bodies of their own species, where we use more of the world's resources than is right, where we empower corporations, which consume the lives of their workers with all the blessings of our government, which grants them the same rights and recognitions historically reserved for humans by the Fourteenth Amendment--the amendment designed to guarantee slaves their status as human beings! This, my friends is consumption."
"Time is a horse you never have to whip."
" 'Listen to me, if you got the fire, then you burn! You don't throw fucking ashes on it! You don't tamp it out! ... It's better to be great and break down than to never be great at all. She knows it, I know it, and anybody with any goddamn courage knows it.' "
"The flora and the simple fauna, they had no fathers, only genetic predecessors, and because they had no fathers, they had no stories, and because they had no stories, they didn't suffer any notion of themselves. In the landscape behind his eye, Henry fashioned a prairie of purple coneflowers, lovely and indistinguishable. He imagined the absurdity of one flower asserting its singularity, its glory, yearning to stand a hard-won inch above its nearest neighbors, straining on its flimsy stalk, flailing its petals, whispering in a hoarse, pollen-choked voice, 'Me! Me! Me!' "
"He wouldn't ever forget that bleak and confusing time, when the world began to see a colored man in the body where a child still resided."
"A short time ago he'd admired northing better than the old picker he'd chased alongside. But he could see now that all these machines ran out of an obligation that was man-made; a thing without a will could run, but never race."
"What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetuated on women and designed to further men's lives at the expense of their own."
"She thought soon all the land would sound like nothing, and no one would know it had once made sounds, that small civilizations had thrived in the grass. It would never register with life again. And what was coming? Concrete. Glassed fronts and sale signs and cash registers. And with it all, people in a torrential surge, carnivorous men and women looking to smear their skin with colors and creams, to bleach their hair, to shave their hides, to cinch themselves breathless in order to think themselves beautiful."
"Nobody talks about a suicide; it grinds generations into the soil of time. That kind of dying tells a tale bigger than one man, and people ought to talk about the how and the why."
" '. . . We live in a consumptive world, where we consume more food than we need, where animals are forced to consume our cast-off poisons and the bodies of their own species, where we use more of the world's resources than is right, where we empower corporations, which consume the lives of their workers with all the blessings of our government, which grants them the same rights and recognitions historically reserved for humans by the Fourteenth Amendment--the amendment designed to guarantee slaves their status as human beings! This, my friends is consumption."
"Time is a horse you never have to whip."
" 'Listen to me, if you got the fire, then you burn! You don't throw fucking ashes on it! You don't tamp it out! ... It's better to be great and break down than to never be great at all. She knows it, I know it, and anybody with any goddamn courage knows it.' "
"The flora and the simple fauna, they had no fathers, only genetic predecessors, and because they had no fathers, they had no stories, and because they had no stories, they didn't suffer any notion of themselves. In the landscape behind his eye, Henry fashioned a prairie of purple coneflowers, lovely and indistinguishable. He imagined the absurdity of one flower asserting its singularity, its glory, yearning to stand a hard-won inch above its nearest neighbors, straining on its flimsy stalk, flailing its petals, whispering in a hoarse, pollen-choked voice, 'Me! Me! Me!' "
"He wouldn't ever forget that bleak and confusing time, when the world began to see a colored man in the body where a child still resided."
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
What a novel to start the year off!
This book is a spectacular achievement. The narrative techniques in the opening chapters absolutely blew me away. There is variety in style, in who is telling the story, the pacing.
Much of my enjoyment was also from the early tension of the protagonists/antagonists and their power struggles. Morgan really knows how to write tension.
Enjoyment is a strong word but I feel justified using it for the first few chapters. Maybe because, or in spite of, the later themes of natural selection and people interpreting it to justify racism and selective inbreeding, not manifesting as strongly in the opening chapters.
I'm so glad this book was written and was so unflinching in its approach to these themes.
Because it doesn't matter that this was written in 2016, excuses for treating people of colour as inferior, like the ones used by both generations of Henry Ford exist to this day. And one of the strengths here is that the book lays them out without obvious criticism for many pages: letting them exist as statements and then prove themselves to be utterly absurd: first in practice, then by science.
It's a strong way to challenge long-held, erroneous, harmful beliefs and The Sport of Kings is given the space to do it.
I made some notes in the opening chapters that this book would have to work very hard not to be a 5-star read.
I'm still really torn about what to rate this, some of the story elements and characters throwing me off a bit. One of the main reasons I'm having trouble rating it is that I found the third chapter so devastating.
In this chapter the book details the long-term effects of systematic racism, including the welfare system in the United States. It's shocking without being melodramatic and gut-wrenching stuff. I found it very moving and hard to read in places.
In a similar way, the fourth chapter fulfills some early shadows to do with natural selection that I suspected (but hoped I was wrong) might occur. I don't really understand the character of Henrietta in this chapter - a lot of her actions seem at odds with her setup, particularly in the end.
Less forgiving, though, is that the plotting suffers a little towards the conclusion. The Grand Themes seem to take over the pace of the story, and the antagonistic character of a jockey ends up more irritating than anything else. I think the end of the book isn't quite satisfying for me, but I appreciate the symbolism of the closing passages.
This book is a time investment, it really should not be rushed, but it's a worthy one.
P.s. This is the first book I read for a MOOP course on How to Read a Novel.
This book is a spectacular achievement. The narrative techniques in the opening chapters absolutely blew me away. There is variety in style, in who is telling the story, the pacing.
Much of my enjoyment was also from the early tension of the protagonists/antagonists and their power struggles. Morgan really knows how to write tension.
Enjoyment is a strong word but I feel justified using it for the first few chapters. Maybe because, or in spite of, the later themes of natural selection and people interpreting it to justify racism and selective inbreeding, not manifesting as strongly in the opening chapters.
I'm so glad this book was written and was so unflinching in its approach to these themes.
Because it doesn't matter that this was written in 2016, excuses for treating people of colour as inferior, like the ones used by both generations of Henry Ford exist to this day. And one of the strengths here is that the book lays them out without obvious criticism for many pages: letting them exist as statements and then prove themselves to be utterly absurd: first in practice, then by science.
It's a strong way to challenge long-held, erroneous, harmful beliefs and The Sport of Kings is given the space to do it.
I made some notes in the opening chapters that this book would have to work very hard not to be a 5-star read.
I'm still really torn about what to rate this, some of the story elements and characters throwing me off a bit. One of the main reasons I'm having trouble rating it is that I found the third chapter so devastating.
In this chapter the book details the long-term effects of systematic racism, including the welfare system in the United States. It's shocking without being melodramatic and gut-wrenching stuff. I found it very moving and hard to read in places.
In a similar way, the fourth chapter fulfills some early shadows to do with natural selection that I suspected (but hoped I was wrong) might occur. I don't really understand the character of Henrietta in this chapter - a lot of her actions seem at odds with her setup, particularly in the end.
Less forgiving, though, is that the plotting suffers a little towards the conclusion. The Grand Themes seem to take over the pace of the story, and the antagonistic character of a jockey ends up more irritating than anything else. I think the end of the book isn't quite satisfying for me
Spoiler
and I still can't believe Henrietta is killed in childbirth. Fallen-woman much?This book is a time investment, it really should not be rushed, but it's a worthy one.
P.s. This is the first book I read for a MOOP course on How to Read a Novel.
I liked this book. At times I loved it at others I found the intensely detailed writing drawn out and boring. The lengths to which sadness befalls every character went beyond moving/disturbing/flawed characters towards jumping the shark. I listened to the book and the narrator was good. It was beautiful writing that lent itself to audio but the length and minutia detail did grate at times. I read this primarily bc it's a TOB play in.
Inimitable, confident, bold. This book comes with, I'm not joking, every trigger warning I can think of. It's kind of about horse racing, but it's really about the American legacy of slavery and systemic racism. There are some missteps here, it's not flawless, yet I can tell I'm not going to forget this one anytime soon, and wish I had some other readers to discuss it with. I need to take a break from fiction after this one.