Resident Book Review of “Horse: A Novel”

Charlestown resident Mimi O’Donnell will review Horse: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks [New York: Viking, 2022] on Tuesday, January16, 2024 at 7 PM in the Auditorium.

Novels which cause me to react emotionally are among my most favorite.  In Horse by Geraldine Brooks, I felt love of family, anger, and sadness.  I cried as I did reading To Kill a Mockingbird and as I think about it, these two novels have similarities.  In both, hatred, racism, jumping to conclusions, and frustrated efforts to make changes in the world are balanced with love.

Horse is a fictionalized story of a real horse named Lexington.  Born in 1850, Lexington, nee Darley, was, maybe the best example of a perfectly conformed racehorse. He only competed in seven races, winning six, before an inherited defect caused the end of his racing career. But as a stud. he sired multiple champions of the Belmont Stakes and the Travers Stakes.

While an entire novel could have been written about the life of the horse and handler, Jarret, it is a story about race problems which have not changed in the last two centuries. Theo, a mixed-race art history PhD candidate at Georgetown, who gave up a promising polo career in England to avoid the jeers from fellow, white competitors, meets and falls in love with Jess, an Australian osteologist (one trained in the study of human and animal skeletons and anatomy). Jess works at the Smithsonian Institutions and becomes interested in bones she finds in the attic in a dusty box simply labeled, “horse.”

Published in 2022, the author, deftly blends the past with the present, art with competitive sport, the many forms of love we all experience, and, unfortunately, racism which is so deeply engrained in history and current events.  The novel moved me in many ways and in this era of George Floyd, anti-Semitism, and international conflict, I hope it moves you too.

Australian author Geraldine Brooks has written many bestsellers and has been awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for March.

Resident Mimi O’Donnell is an active Charlestown leader, who has presented ELLIC programs and book reviews.