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128 reviews for:
The Sport of Kings: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017
C.E. Morgan
128 reviews for:
The Sport of Kings: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017
C.E. Morgan
dark
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
See my review here:
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/review-1382-the-sport-of-kings/
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/review-1382-the-sport-of-kings/
This was Literature with a capital L. The story moved slowly, but I liked how the flashback and family history fit together. While I liked the writing, I don't know if I enjoyed reading it. The biological and evolutionary explanations get chewy, and I caught myself skimming thought them.
It was so long, overly descriptive, limited dialogue, poor transitions between characters and just boring.
I did not enjoy this one bit. I understand it has important themes of racism but I have read literature which is way stronger and powerful than this, like The Help and Jasper Jones.
Just disappointing. I had to flick through the last two hundred pages because I couldn’t stand the extensive description. This book easily could of been two hundred pages or less.
I did not enjoy this one bit. I understand it has important themes of racism but I have read literature which is way stronger and powerful than this, like The Help and Jasper Jones.
Just disappointing. I had to flick through the last two hundred pages because I couldn’t stand the extensive description. This book easily could of been two hundred pages or less.
Once your ear adjusts to the grandiose language (Grass is green. I get it.), this horseracing epic delivers a Faulknerian sweep that’s dizzying, confounding, exhilarating & sometimes just plain nuts. Generations of an American thoroughbred dynasty claw their way across Kentucky bluegrass (still green) in a brutal Darwinian fight for bloodlines—people & horses. Yes, it’s as much about race as racing. Not a smooth ride, but you’ll learn the difference between dark bay, roan & chestnut. If you saddle up, keep the whip ready.
3.5 stars. There are some genius moments in this book. Every character is deeply flawed so it is hard to love this book. I feel like the author could have used some editing. I enjoyed the overall story, but it is very heavy and very detailed.
Couldn't finish this. It's clear that she can write, but the style is far overwritten for my taste (but then I don't like Faulkner, so adjust for your own proclivities). If it had been 250 pages instead of 550, I'd have finished it and probably thought, 'well that was a slog, but there was some beautiful prose and some interesting moments'. As it was, after 200 pages, the lone and level sands of the other 350 stretched out ahead of me and I despaired. I couldn't bring myself to care.
I read this because it was highly recommended to me by a colleague, and it had good reviews. But it took me a month to read, continually putting it aside for other books, which is not a good thing. I don't know why, it just dragged - maybe because I read too much YA, maybe because none of the characters were sympathetic or grabbed me. It was well written - but it wasn't for me.
This book is offensive. I can only hope the reader will read past his or her objections. It is offensive to blacks, to monied whites, to animal rights activists, to horse-racing enthusiasts, to atheists, to Christians, to hillbillies and a combination of any or all of the above. I loved every minute of it. This book gets in your face and into your brain. Morgan takes Homeric and idyllic pastoral scenes to an entirely new level in the modern novel. The writing is lush, but accurate to every detail. I heard echoes of Milton and Shakespeare in the cadence of the language. The Southern Gothic has been resurrected, only Faulkner has moved to Kentucky, where the idea of the Old South has been both manufactured and maintained by families who imagine themselves as monied, but whose lives are but a gamble. It's a Williams play, had he written a saga. Descriptions of mountains are straight from Robert Penn Warren, Wendell Berry, Kingsolver. The story of slaves an amplified Harriet Beecher Stowe. The sense of generations from Lee Smith. This is one of the richest novels I've read in a long time, whose characters filled my dreams. The stream of conscious/unconscious evolution, Darwinian, point toward the paradox of order in disorder. I wonder if readers who are not "from there" will get it. I've been there, I know the roads and towns. I've seen the horse farms and tracks. I've eaten Derby pie and drunk mint juleps. I sincerely hope this book enters the canon of modern American literature. The author seems to me, much like the filly Hellsmouth, finely honed as a champion.
4.5 stars This novel is sweeping, fully immersive, a testament to the varieties of literary and art genres. Morgan tells the story of the Forge family, a Kentucky farm-cum-racehorse family with a darkly racist past and present. She weaves so many elements of storytelling together: omniscient narration, sermons, parables, textbook entries, diary entries, scientific theory and philosophy, playwriting, 2nd person point of view, and slave narrative. This novel is all-consuming and, at 545 pages, took me a long time to read. Morgan scathingly critiques racism in the South; her story spans hundreds of years, from the Revolutionary War to 2006, just before Obama was elected the first Black president. The 2006 storyline felt eerily similar to the earlier storylines in its characters' archaic ideology about race. In fact, I often forgot I was reading a story that took place in the 21st century except when characters reminded me by taking out their cell phones or emailing each other. Morgan so aptly shows how this place in Kentucky is stuck in the past; her focus is akin to that of a Faulkner novel but without the overt modernist techniques. I found Allmon's story the most fascinating: the son of a deadbeat white father and mother who suffers from lupus and dies when Allmon is merely 17 years old, he goes to prison and learns how to groom the very best racehorses. His haunting past ruptures the novel on a number of occasions: his ancestor Scipio was an escaped slave who swam across a vicious river to freedom. In essence, his efforts to seek a better life for himself and future generations of African Americans are rendered futile; the Black characters in the novel (especially Allmon) learn repeatedly that they are merely pawns in a white world. Allmon's inability to treat his own emerging health condition because he doesn't have health insurance--despite working for one of the richest men in Kentucky and playing an instrumental role in grooming winning horses for him--feels like a contemporary form of slaves not having access to healthcare. Morgan's commentary about race relations is the most poignant aspect of her novel. The lengthy horse and horseracing descriptions weren't nearly as compelling to me, probably because I don't have an interest in horses, and her attempt to make Hellsmouth, a young filly who outruns more experienced colts, a main character of the novel fell a bit flat for me. I was drawn to the novel's frequent meditation about gender and how women are disposable beings in this male-dominated world and I appreciated the analogy that I think Morgan attempted to create between the filly and Henrietta, Henry Forge's daughter who falls in love with a Black man and is consequently punished for her actions. This novel isn't perfect by any means, but what Morgan achieves is commendable: a thoughtful and critical contemplation of how our country remains not only haunted by our past (slavery) but steeped in it. She unequivocally declares that we are not living in post-racial times.