Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘March’ in 2005, and in ‘Horse’, her sixth novel, she returns, at least in part,  to America in the mid-19th C.  She weaves together a number of plot lines that extend from that time to today’s world creating memorable characters to produce a powerful novel about slavery and and racism in America of the 21st C.

Early in the book we are introduced to the connecting element, a horse born in 1855, raised and trained by a slave in pre-civil war Kentucky.  The horse, named Lexington, and his trainer, Jarrett, are sold and resold, as they win race after race and Lexington becomes a legend. Over 100 hundred years later,  a painting of Lexington, left on a curb in Washington, D.C. is found by a graduate student in art history who takes it to the Smithsonian to be cleaned and assessed.  At the same time, Lexington’s skeleton is discovered in the attic of the Smithsonian where Jess, an Aussie specialist in mounting skeletons, joins the plot.    Through a series of cleverly constructed events, Jarrett, Theo, Jess, and a few minor characters combine to create a fine story, informative and moving.  Theo and Jarrett are perhaps the most tightly bound with the link being their black skin and how it affects their lives and ultimately their deaths.

Describing the plot in more detail would spoil it for future readers.  Suffice it to say that this is a finely constructed and well written novel that kept me eagerly looking forward to reading more of it every time I put it down.  A New York Times best-seller and perhaps the most often recommended book to me over the last year, I heartily recommend it to you as well.