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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Fiction Award
A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history.
Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.
New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.
Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse—one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.
Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.
THEO
Georgetown, Washington, DC
2019
The deceptively reductive forms of the artist's work belie the density of meaning forged by a bifurcated existence. These glyphs and ideograms signal to us from the crossroads: freedom and slavery, White and Black, rural and urban.
No. Nup. That wouldn't do. It reeked of PhD. This was meant to be read by normal people.
Theo pressed the delete key and watched the letters march backward to oblivion. All that was left was the blinking cursor, tapping like an impatient finger. He sighed and looked away from its importuning. Through the window above his desk, he noticed that the elderly woman who lived in the shabby row house directly across the street was dragging a bench press to the curb. As the metal legs screeched across the pavement, Clancy raised a startled head and jumped up, putting his front paws on the desk beside Theo's laptop. His immense ears, like radar dishes, twitched toward the noise. Together, Theo and the dog watched as she shoved the bench into the teetering ziggurat she'd assembled. Propped against it, a hand-lettered sign: FREE STUFF.
Theo wondered why she hadn't had a yard sale. Someone would've paid for that bench press. Or even the faux-Moroccan footstool. When she brought out an armful of men's clothing, it occurred to Theo that all the items in the pile must be her dead husband's things. Perhaps she just wanted to purge the house of every trace of him.
Theo could only speculate, since he didn't really know her. She was the kind of thin-lipped, monosyllabic neighbor who didn't invite pleasantries, much less intimacies. And her husband had made clear, through his body language, what he thought about having a Black man living nearby. When Theo moved into Georgetown University's graduate housing complex a few months earlier, he'd made a point of greeting the neighbors. Most responded with a friendly smile. But the guy across the street hadn't even made eye contact. The only time Theo had heard his voice was when it was raised, yelling at his wife.
It was a week since the ambulance had come in the night. Like most city dwellers, Theo could sleep right through a siren that Dopplered away, but this one had hiccuped to sudden silence. Theo jolted awake to spinning lights bathing his walls in a wash of blue and red. He jumped out of bed, ready to help if he could. But in the end, he and Clancy just stood and watched as the EMTs brought out the body bag, turned the lights off, and drove silently away.
At his grandmother's house in Lagos, any death in the neighborhood caused a flurry in the kitchen. As a kid visiting on school holidays, he'd often been tasked with delivering the steaming platters of food to the bereaved. So he made a stew the next day, wrote a condolence card, and carried it across the street. When no one answered the door, he left it on the stoop. An hour later, he found it back on his own doorstep with a terse note: Thanks but I don't like chicken. Theo looked down at Clancy and shrugged. "I thought everyone liked chicken." They ate it themselves. It was delicious, infused with the complex flavors of grilled peppers and his homemade, slow-simmered stock. Not that Clancy, the kelpie, cared about that. In the no-nonsense insouciance of his hardy breed, he'd eat anything.
The thought of that casserole made Theo's mouth water. He glanced at the clock in the corner of his laptop. Four p.m. Too early to quit. As he started typing, Clancy circled under the desk and flopped back down across his instep.
These arresting compelling images are the only known surviving works created by an artist born into slavery enslaved. Vernacular, yet eloquent, they become semaphores from a world convulsed. Living Surviving through the Civil War, forsaking escaping the tyranny of the plantation for a marginalized life in the city, the artist seems compelled to bear witness to his own reality, paradoxically exigent yet ...
Excerpted from Horse by Geraldine Brooks. Copyright © 2022 by Geraldine Brooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Penguin Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
Winner: 2022 Best Fiction Award.
Geraldine Brooks creates a powerful backstory for 19th-century thoroughbred racehorse Lexington, weaving a rich tapestry of historical and current-day narratives that aptly reflect how the legacy of slavery still ripples through America.
Horse truly does offer something for every reader. Brooks seamlessly weaves fact and fiction, past and present, to tell the story of the remarkable Lexington and examine race in America. The real-life Lexington was not only known for his breathtaking speed and agility on the track, but also for his equally talented progeny. Brooks engineers a plausible biography for the horse, filling in the blanks with intriguing research as she traces the history of thoroughbred racing, including the impact of Black jockeys and the Civil War on the industry. This is complemented by compelling contemporary narratives that explore the complex dynamics of race and relationships today.
The novel begins in 2019 with the dueling narratives of Theo, a Nigerian graduate student of the arts working on his thesis, and Jess, a white scientist working for the Smithsonian. Theo salvages a painting of a horse from his neighbor's garbage; Jess unearths horse bones discarded in a neglected attic space. These discoveries bring the characters together and a romantic relationship ensues, complicated by their divergent racial heritage. Jess is Australian and relatively new to the US, and is naive to the myriad concessions and considerations Theo must make due to the color of his skin. Alternately, while a victim of racism both subtle and overt, Theo purposefully tries to look beyond race. At one point, he discloses that he was judged by his former girlfriend as "insufficiently steeped in an experience of American Blackness" to date a Black woman. Despite Jess's protestations that race is not an issue, she first meets Theo when she mistakenly believes he is stealing her bicycle. Jess and Theo's narratives are entrancing enough to stand on their own as an engrossing read. Brooks is deft at characterization; more than once I found myself wanting to meet Jess or Theo at a local coffee shop so I could hear more of their stories.
On the heels of Jess's and Theo's narratives comes Jarrett's, or as Brooks notably titles these sections, "Warfield's Jarrett," reflective of Dr. Warfield's ownership and underscoring Jarrett's status as a slave. Jarrett's story, beginning in 1850, narrates Lexington's time as a foal and Jarrett's deep and abiding connection with the horse. Jarrett is the son of trainer Harry Lewis, and is sold along with Lexington to various affluent, white horse owners. His tale traverses the early halcyon days of thoroughbred racing (as Jarrett becomes Lexington's primary caretaker and ultimately his trainer), through a daring escape from Confederate clutches during the Civil War, and Lexington's later days as a successful stud.
The historic underpinnings of the work are as spellbinding as the characters. Whether Brooks is chronicling the history of thoroughbred racing, exploring the impact of the Civil War on African American jockeys, or detailing the nuances of American equestrian art, it is all equally engrossing. Likewise, each character's backstory is transfixing. The novel ends with a resounding and shocking crescendo that demands an examination of race in America today.
Horse will buoy your soul, break your heart, educate your mind and leave you waiting for Brooks's next work. It is just that spectacular.
Reviewed by Jane McCormack
Rated 
of 5
by Shirley Larson
This book reflects the time of the Civil War and narrates three different eras regarding the famous racehorse named Lexington who ultimately sired many great racehorses up until the present time. The characters are well drawn and the story very engaging. The writer Geraldine Brooks has a way with words that makes historical fiction realistic and also entertaining. I enjoyed the book very much.
Rated of 5
by Ruth Rondberg
Great Book
I was unsure about reading a book about a horse but once I started and realized the complexity and beauty of this novel I became very sure of the book’s value.
Rated of 5
by Cloggie Downunder
A wonderful novel that is probably her best yet.
“Jarret wondered how it could be possible to have so much, just from gambling on cards and horses. If a man could win all this, then maybe he could lose it. What if he decided to wager Lexington away, or the two of them? They were his property, just like the barn.”
Horse is the sixth novel by Pulitzer prize-winning Australian author, Geraldine Brooks. In 1850, in Lexington, Kentucky, Warfield’s Jarret, son of talented Black horse trainer Harry Lewis, is present for the birth of a foal destined to become the nineteenth Century’s most remarkable racehorse and the greatest thoroughbred stud sire in racing history: Lexington.
In 1852, freelance journalist and artist, Thomas J. Scott witnesses the closeness of the pair when he is there to capture the horse in oils.
In 2019, aspiring art historian and freelance writer Theo Northam is in Washington DC working on a thesis about the representation of black people in nineteenth Century art when he stumbles on a dingy painting of a bay colt in a junk pile. He takes advantage of a Smithsonian contact to have the painting identified and evaluated at their Conservation Institute.
Australian manager of the vertebrate Osteology Prep Lab at the Smithsonian Museum Support Centre, Jess encounters Theo when she tries to find out more about the nineteenth Century equine skeleton kept for many years in a dusty museum attic, located at the request of a British researcher studying equine anatomy.
In 1954, Manhattan gallery owner Martha Jackson is offered a painting that markedly departs from the usual style of her acquisitions, but her generally quiescent sentimental bone twinges, and she adds the painting to her private collection.
How these characters are linked is the basis of an enthralling tale that serves as a tribute to horses and art, and those who love and care for both. But the reader doesn’t have to be a fan of horses or racing or art to be utterly captivated.
Told over three timelines by five main narrators, this story gives the reader a wholly credible collision of reality and imagination, interweaving fact with fiction, all of it rich in historical detail. a marvelously diverse cast of real people and fictional characters. Brooks gives them depth and appeal, wise words and insightful observations. And she does it all with some gorgeous descriptive prose.
“Jarret learned the unfamiliar names: the burnt sienna that he’d thought of as mere brown, the French ultramarine that he’d known simply as blue. But blue wasn’t so simple to Scott. He had Prussian blue, cerulean, cobalt, teal, navy. So many complicated words for a simple thing. Jarret knew the names for horse colors— bay, blood bay, buckskin, dun, roan— but now it seemed like every other thing was just as various if you troubled to look at it closely.”
“It wasn’t a good idea to speak without putting a deal of thought into it. Words could be snares. Less of them you laid out there, less likely they could trap you up.”
While the focus is on the horse and the people around him, Brooks also touches on racism in all its extremes: slavery, the shooting of unarmed black people, and the insidious everyday racism that occurs due to privilege or ignorance. The ingrained cruelty of modern-day horseracing, especially to those horses that fail to make the grade, is also touched on.
Her meticulous research into horses, art, and racism is apparent on every page and it is heartening to see that she has incorporated her late husband’s love of Civil War history into the story. A wonderful novel that is probably her best yet.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK.
Rated of 5
by Cathryn Conroy
A Masterpiece! Truly Imaginative, Multilayered Story That Is a Gripping, Can't-Put-It-Down Read
A book about a racehorse from the 1850s? Well, that doesn't interest me. But a book by Geraldine Brooks? That I cannot resist. She is one of my favorite authors, and this novel is yet again a reason why.
Quite simply, this is a masterpiece. It's a truly imaginative, multilayered story that is a gripping, can't-put-it-down read.
The book is several stories in one, but the common thread is the true story of Lexington, a powerful, legendary racehorse in the 1850s that transformed the sport. With Lexington as the centerpiece, Brooks has crafted multiple stories, each of which is riveting:
• Lexington, Kentucky, 1850: Jarrett, an enslaved young man in Kentucky, has a special talent for training horses. At a young age, he is given responsibility for Lexington, and the two develop a special bond that is never severed. One night during the Civil War, Jarrett's courage and passion are supremely tested.
• Lexington, Kentucky, 1850: Thomas J. Scott is an itinerant painter specializing in horses. His chapters are written in the first person just as he would have spoken.
• New York City, 1954: Martha Jackson is one of the very few female art dealers. Although she specializes in modern art, she comes across an oil painting of Lexington of mysterious origin.
• Washington, D.C., 2019: The unlikely pair of Jess, an Australian bone specialist with the Smithsonian who finds Lexington's preserved skeleton in a Smithsonian warehouse attic, and Theo, a Nigerian American PhD student in art history at Georgetown University who finds one of Scott's paintings of Lexington discarded in a curbside junk pile, meet and develop both a professional and personal relationship.
But this is more than a horse story. Throughout the book, Brooks deftly deals with racism—from the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery to the piercing and hurtful racial microaggressions that taunt Blacks today. How Jarrett and Theo feel and how they are treated is as important a part of the story as what they do.
The chapters bounce back and forth in time and place, but Brooks, the consummate storyteller, always has it under control so it's never confusing or disjointed. Rich historical detail, complex characters, and writing that is pitch-perfect together make this an extraordinary novel—even for those of us who know nothing about racehorses.
An aside: The dedication made me cry. Truly. So much that I couldn't turn the page right away.
Rated of 5
by sealibber
beautiful book
Not an equestrian personally but the beauty in which Brookes writes of horses and their keepers is fantastic and entrancing. She does not hesitate to go into the very uncomfortable past and present state of race and relations and the often inhumane treatment of animals and the juxtaposition of the two.
Rated of 5
by Marie Cassidy-Walker
Thoroughly recommended
"Smithsonian Museum Support Centre, Maryland 2019: Catherine stepped up to the exhibit label on the plinth and drew out her reading glasses. “Horse!” she read. “I can’t believe it! I don’t suppose you people have the Mona Lisa stashed somewhere, labelled, Smiling Girl?” She ran a finger over the terse nameplate. “Not just Horse,” she said. “The horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.” (p70)
This is the story of an enslaved groom named Jarret and the compelling relationship between him and a famous US thoroughbred racehorse called Lexington. It is a story about enslavement, racism, horse racing, art and science and the book is set in 3 different time periods: 1850, 1950, and 2019. The story lines have been thoroughly researched and I learned so much, loved it.
Rated of 5
by Renee Claudette Shambeau
The best book I have read this year!
Author's command of English is excellent. The Art and Science and Character development and the Horse himself led to very satisfying reading. I have read many books on racism and slavery and the story Brooks tells is a whole new slant on history.
Rated 
of 5
by Louisa
Horse
I love horses and liked this book because it gave a look into a part of history unknown to me. Amazingly researched. I thought a different format, rather than short chapters set in different years, would have made the story easier to follow. Other than that, it was wonderful .
On its face, the end of the Civil War should have marked a time in which African Americans would be afforded freedom. But the end of slavery did not mean the end of Black oppression. Many white Americans built their fortunes on, and were heavily entrenched in, slavery's infrastructure. These individuals, as well as others, bore great resentment for freed slaves, viewing them as a direct threat to their livelihoods. Rather than reveling in newfound freedom, many Black Americans faced hostility and bitterness, including those in the thoroughbred racing industry. Black jockeys and trainers who once found success in their fields now found a target on their backs.
As Geraldine Brooks notes in the Afterword of Horse, the "thriving" horse racing industry so popular before the Civil War "was built on the labor and skills of the Black horsemen," many of whom were enslaved. There is ample historical evidence to indicate that Black jockeys were both prevalent and successful prior to the Civil War. Contemporaneous equestrian paintings by Edward Troye show the Black jockeys and handlers alongside the horses, illustrating their integral role and accomplishments.
From 1875-1902, Black jockeys such as Oliver Lewis, Isaac Murphy and Jimmy "Wink" Winkfield won the Kentucky Derby, before the tide of Jim Crow racism washed over the tracks. In fact, records indicate that Black jockeys won 15 out of the first 28 Kentucky Derbies in the late 1800s. Horse racing in the South declined as a result of the Civil War destruction, and jockeys began to migrate North for opportunities.
Racism pervaded horse racing after the brief era of Reconstruction. Research shows systemic attacks against Black jockeys, as white jockeys would use tactics such as "boxing them out during races, running them into the rail, and hitting them with riding crops," according to a historical study by researchers Michael Leeds and Hugh Rockoff. Not only did these practices endanger the jockeys, they put valuable racehorses at risk as well, so owners began to overlook Black jockeys, or worse, colluded with white jockeys to exclude them, for fear that their horses would be harmed. Jimmy Winkfield received death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, resulting in him and many other Black riders going abroad to make a living.
From 1921 to 2000, no Black jockeys rode in the Kentucky Derby. The rampant and violent racism had accomplished its malevolent goal. Winkfield's life speaks to the marginalization of Black jockeys as, upon returning to America, he was initially denied entrance to a pre-Derby banquet in 1961, despite being invited to attend by Sports Illustrated. Nearly 60 years had passed since Wink's back-to-back Derby wins, and he still faced deep-seated racism. He was not inducted into the Museum of Racing Hall of Fame until 2004, 30 years after his death.
Long overdue, the Kentucky Derby Museum opened the Black Heritage in Racing Exhibit in 1993, and expanded it in March of 2021. It's now part of a larger collection of tours and exhibits in Louisville honoring the contributions of Black residents dubbed the Unfiltered Truth Collection.
Jimmy Winkfield, courtesy of BlackPast
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