Review of the Day: Horse by Geraldine Brooks

When I was in graduate school, in the fall of 2001, I worked as a TA for a computer science professor named Jens Palsberg, now at UCLA. The course I helped with was a course in theoretical computer science and compilers. But one of the main purposes of the course was to teach graduate students to write reviews of technical papers. I remember one of the less technical lessons Jens passed on to his students was to spend more time on the good papers and less time on the ones not as good. I will follow Jens’ suggestion and try and review this book quickly.

The short version of Brooks’ novel is that it is the story of the discovery in 2019 of a 19th century painting of a thoroughbred horse and his trainer. The problem with the book is that it just tries to do too much by including the history of slavery, the life and conditions of black men who worked with horses in 1850s Kentucky, black lives matter, an interracial romance, the beginnings of the COVID pandemic and many other issues. At least in my opinion, Horse could have been a very good novel if it were stripped down to its core and just 250 pages long.

In addition, the prose was pedestrian. When I read a book of literary fiction, one of the things I look forward to is finding well-constructed sentences worth pausing over and, perhaps, even worth memorizing. I often mark multiple lines in the book I am reading. The only line I marked in this book was:

There’s a lot more of it, but I can’t believe I remembered that much. Why do bad poems stick in the brain better than good ones?

kindle and libro.fm audiobook. 401 pgs. 15 June 2025.

QOTD: What was the last book you read that you were told was going to be great that disappointed you?