Until Horse came along, I could never have imagined a book that would fascinate both my race-horse raising brother and me, his art-loving sister. I loved this novel. Author Geraldine Brooks deftly weaves multiple story lines and time frames into a single heart-stopping novel. First, there is the story of Jarrett, the enslaved horse-trainer of Lexington, one of the best thoroughbreds of all time, beginning when Jarrett is young and Lexington is a foal in the 1850s, moving through the Civil War and beyond. This is historical fiction at its best. Jarrett is fully developed and just superb when set into the antebellum South.
There are three contemporary plot lines. One follows Jess, an Australian woman who runs the Osteology Department of the Smithsonian Institution and is in charge of rebuilding Lexington’s skeleton. The second is that of Theo, a Nigerian-American PhD student in art history, who is writing his thesis on American equestrian art and how the horses are individualized but the black grooms are not—until he finds an equestrian piece in his neighbors’ trash that makes him reconsider his thesis. He becomes involved with Jess. The third, set during the 1950’s, is a glimpse into the lives of artist Jackson Pollock and art dealer Martha Jackson, who has a single American equestrian piece in her private collection. These stories are linked by this junkyard find, and the book meshes past and present—and America’s racial issues—in a deeply emotional story.
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Horse(Viking First Edition, June 14, 2022) is available through:
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