Theo’s, for instance, is academic and high-flown, Jarret’s earthy. I especially enjoyed Brooks’ deft use of style: each character has his/her individual vocabulary, syntax, turn of phrase. Or to use a different metaphor, like a choir singing a complex piece of choral music, voices and melodies echoing each other, repeating, amplifying, muting, overlapping, first in major, then minor keys. The stories of people and places are interlaced, with each illuminating all the others. Martha’s story is set in the New York art world of the 1950s, something of which I knew through my interest in Georgia O’Keeffe.

The story of Jess is set in the fascinating back end of the Smithsonian (who knew?) where she works with Lexington’s skeleton and with an equine vet who helps her discover the secrets of the bones. The stories of Jarret, Lexington, and Tom are set in mid-19th-century Kentucky plantations and racing stables, and show the daily lives of the Black men and boys who served the affluent Whites’ love of racing as well as their exploitation of both animals and enslaved people.

Martha, lover of art and artists, whose mother died on a horse. Theo, tragically thin-skinned and prickly, who is writing his doctoral thesis on 19th-century paintings of Black men and horses and who is loved by Jess the bone-lover, who has the wisdom to see through him. Tom, who can never quite measure up until he does. There’s dedicated, single-minded Jarret, whose life is devoted to a spectacular horse who absolutely loves to win. With Horse, she’s done it again, but this time, she’s made me care very deeply about the people she introduces me to. With her novel People of the Book, gave me all three. I also appreciate novels that introduce me to people I’ll never meet, take me places I’ll never visit, and make me see the world in a different way. Of Martha Jackson (real), an art gallery owner who becomes obsessed with a mysterious nineteenth-century painting of a horse, set in New York in 1954.Of Theo, a Nigerian-American art history grad student who finds a painting of a famous horse, and Jess, an Australian and a Smithsonian curator who lives for bones, both fictional characters, set in Washington DC in 2019 and.

The story of a bay thoroughbred named Lexington (real), his enslaved Black groom, Jarret (fictional), and a young horse painter, Thomas Scott (real), set in the turbulent South in the 1850s-1870s.

What’s more, two of three are true–and there’s as much sad truth as fiction in the third. In Horse, Geraldine Brooks tells three stories, effectively, carefully, tenderly braiding all three into one compelling narrative. I especially admire novels that manage to tell more than one story and do it well. The only known photo of Lexington, with an unnamed groom

Geraldine brooks new book