A review by maiakobabe
Horse by Geraldine Brooks

adventurous informative medium-paced

2.5

This book follows multiple different story lines, some of which captured me much more than others. In Kentucky in 1850, an enslaved black boy watches a new thoroughbred racing colt's birth and begins a lifelong relationship with the horse, who will go on to be one of the most well-known champions in the history of American horse racing. In New York City in the 1950s, a gallery owner known for her modern tastes falls for an equestrian portrait of the great Kentucky race horse, Lexington. And in 2019, in Washington DC, a Nigerian-American art history student and a Smithsonian scientist dig into the mystery of an unlabelled horse skeleton in the museum's collection- and its possible connection with several paintings by a Civil War era equestrian artist. I admired the amount of research that went into this novel, and the way the paintings of Lexington tied the different timelines together. However, I really struggled with how the interior emotional lives of several of the Black male characters in this book were portrayed by this author. When Jarret, the enslaved Black groom, is separated from Lexington and forced into plantation labor temporarily, Brooks writes of him gaining a depth of spirit and understanding for the human condition from this experience. This felt deeply weird to read from a white author! I'm not really the right reader to say whether Brooks did a good job or not, but it put me on edge. When the final climatic moment of the novel read like a heavy-handed lesson in how Black men are still at risk of police violence even in 2019, I wondered who exactly that point was supposed to be for, and if Brooks is the one who needed to make it. So, I felt very mixed as I finished this book. There's a lot to admire craft-wise, and I can understand why so many readers were impressed by it. But I honestly I don't recommend it, unless you want to read it in a book club setting and have a nuanced discussion about what works and what doesn't in this novel.