BookLife Review: Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Thoroughbred horse racing, antebellum African American history in horse training, equestrian art, osteo-zoology, animal skeletons, white privilege, Kentucky, Washington DC

Geraldine Brooks delivers a fresh and compelling #historicalnovel that manages to be simultaneously starkly contemporary in its themes. A quirky Australian-born osteo #zoologist from the @smithsonian who specializes in animal skeletons happens upon the articulated skeleton of one of the country's earliest #thoroughbred #racehorses. Her love-interest, an #AfricanAmerican art history PhD student, discovers a painting of that same horse in a neighbor's curbside junk pile. Cleverly attempting to parlay his find into another paid article for a magazine, their two paths cross. The zoologist is white. Despite her conversational missteps and her inherent bias, the two are drawn together and together unearth historical facts about the race horse and the enslaved and free black men who were the key trainers and jockeys of the horse but were largely uncredited with its success. Told in alternating chapters set in the pre-Civil War South horse stables and the museum and academic community of Washington DC, the story gallops to an explosive and shocking climax all-too-real in modern day urban life. Brooks' writing is the deeply researched, detail-rich and real kind that makes me eager to track down her prior books. @booktok @bookpeeps.