This is a great big tremendous sprawl of a novel about Kentucky thoroughbred racing, genetics, consanguinity, slavery, prison time, Cincinnati, bluegrass country and the Ohio River with some of most striking prose I've read in a long time. There are murders and revenge and love and incest across many generations. Survival is registered in different ways. I couldn't put it down but sometimes it took some pushing to pick it up. The book club struggled and agreed a tougher editor was needed but the writing took my breath away:

"The air was raucous and thick with birdsong, the afternoon's light refracted through a veil of pollen...cattle, sturdy on their legs and fattening...chewed their cud with the resignation of age... The youngest Miller...a girl of seven with violently red hair, a face mottled with freckles, and knees as fat as pickle jars."
Description of the Ohio River: "La belle riviere: the Great, the Sparkling, the White; coursing along the path of the ancient Teays, the child of Pleistocene glaciers and a thousand forgotten creeks run dry, formed in perpetuity by the confluence of two prattling streams, ancient predecessors of the Kentucky and Licking--maternal and paternal themes in the long tale of how the river became dream, conduit, divide, pawn, baptismal font, gate, graveyard, and snake slithering under a shelf of limestone and shale, where just now a boy is held aloft by his beautiful father, who points and says, "Look!" and the boy looks, and what he will remember later is not just the river like a snake but also the city crowding it, and what a city! A queen rising on seven hills over her Tiber, ringed hills forming the circlet of a crown. " ( )

It was an awful lot of verbiage. Somewhere in the middle of this verbose novel, set in the borderlands of the slavery-haunted South, the author unexpectedly turns meta and writes,

Or is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much - the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin? I say there's no such thing - any striving is calcined ash before the heat of the ever-expanding world, its interminability and brightness, which is neither yours nor mine. There aren't too many words; there aren't enough words; ten thousand books, all the world's dictionaries and there would never be enough; we're infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way, the icy display of aurora borealis and the redundancies of the night sky, the flakes of snow common and heartbreaking...

Well, yes, I understand that confronted by the ineffable timelessness of this world (and the horrors it contains) that it seems one could pour word after word in perpetuity down its black mouth and never fill it, but it did become too much for me, actually. The whole novel is a lot of a muchness, certainly in flowing florid authorial musing, and in the end in plot development, in which incest gets thrown in to the mix not because it is actually needed to add depth or propulsion but because when you're going for too much muchness, you've simply got to have some incest in there somewhere.

Yet the novel has plenty going for it, still. Morgan pins her native state of Kentucky to the examination table and dissects it with clear eyed animus. A provocative parallel is drawn between slavery and modern horse racing, with the latter an outlet for continuing notions of eugenics and purity through forced breeding and a hateful expression of innate superiority that warps the soul. And if Henry Forge's late conversion from hard racist to gentle humanitarian seems a tad too easily won, at least the triggering mechanism is believable, and the change satisfying. ( )

Ballsy.

Morgan writes a book that in many ways parallels the filly at the forefront of the tale. It starts from behind in the sense the reader isn't quite sure what kind of writer this is going to be or whether the book is really going to engage. But before you know it, the plot is galloping along full bore, and suddenly you, as a reader, have a sensation that the whole thing could derail. It's as though the author has so many talents that she doesn't know which ones to bring to bear and when, making the whole novel simultaneously brilliant and terribly flawed. Honestly, it felt a little bit like reading a collaboration of V.C. Andrews, the screen writers for "Dallas" and Wallace Stegner, or perhaps James Michener. Yeah, hard to imagine, right?

To further complicate matters, the themes are big ones - - power, racism, sexism, and family. Morgan also spans huge chunks of time so there's a sense that the book is epic in scope.

I'd say there's a five star book in here, but I don't really think there is. What there is, is a five star author who when she harnesses her power and exercises a little more restraint, is going to write something super brilliant, and I'm excited to see what it is. Hopefully she didn't exhaust herself completely with this effort.

The plot really focuses on three main characters, Henry, his daughter, Henrietta, and Allmon, a groom. We get the back story on all three, and the characters are all interesting if not terribly likable. Henry, going against the wishes of his father, turns his inherited farm into a horse breeding facility, and he sees Henrietta as the heir to all he has worked for and the family name. Henrietta seems compliant, but is in fact, pretty wild and rebellious, and this rebellion ensnares Allmon in a pretty untenable situation. Something he is familiar with because nothing in his life has gone well, and I do mean nothing.

The critic in me wasn't totally wild about the long passages of description which are beautifully rendered, but would have been more impactful in smaller doses. The author really shows her talents here, but it does slow the pace and make you want to skim.

This book won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction in 2016. It was up against the nominees listed here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/2016-kirkus-prize-finalists/. I've only read two of the books on the list. I most certainly think this one was much better than [b:The Underground Railroad|30555488|The Underground Railroad|Colson Whitehead|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1493178362s/30555488.jpg|48287641] which addresses similar subject matter in many ways, although perhaps harder to get through due to the length and some of the description. [b:A Gentleman in Moscow|29430012|A Gentleman in Moscow|Amor Towles|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1459524472s/29430012.jpg|45743836] was tighter and more polished, and for me, more enjoyable to read overall. But this author absolutely is showing more flashes of brilliance and potential so I can see why this one won.

This book would be outstanding for a book club discussion, but unfortunately, half the club probably won't finish it.



( )

I found this book very dark and depressing. The title is a bit misleading, as horse racing is only a backdrop for a story of the Forge family and their former slaves' history, and Henry Forge's desire to build a legacy. There are many triggers in this book including racism, slavery, abuse of children, women and animals, rape, incest, suicide, drugs, language and stereotyping. The characters are well-drawn, but not particularly likeable. It appears to be an ambitious effort to write an epic; however, there are many paragraphs that seem unnecessary, with nonsequiturs thrown in occasionally. I am sure the author had a good reason for these passages, but I could not discern it. ( )

Depressing and melodramatic for the most part. Bright spots were where we were given information about racehorses: care, training from foal to three-year old and how much and what goes into horseracing itself. ( )