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erica_o 's review for:
The Sport of Kings
by C.E. Morgan
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.