The Sport of Kings

by C.E. Morgan

The daring, inventive novel (a sprawling family saga set in Kentucky that combines southern gothic with the drama of horse racing) from a brilliant young author named one of The New Yorker 's "20 Best Writers Under 40."

Here is the ambitious, strikingly original, and dazzling new novel from a young writer whose first novel, All the Living , received passionate praise and rave reviews, and earned her one of the highly coveted spots on The New Yorker 's list of the "20 Best Writers Under 40" alongside such peers as Karen Russell, Wells Tower, Téa Obreht, and Dinaw Mengestu. But where that first novel had startling ambition and scope yet strictly contained its remarkable energy within notably spare language and a pared-down setting and time frame, this new novel's energy bursts out of the gate running and gallops through generations, consuming a multitude of characters and plots.
The title The Sport of Kings refers to horse racing, and the novel centres itself within that a connected web of humans and animals, as well as a fertile patch of land, in the heart of Kentucky. With breathtaking fluency, C.E. Morgan puts us inside the consciousness of an extraordinary range of characters who inhabit that patch of land through the an adolescent trying to grow up under the withering gaze of his landowner father; a brilliant black woman struggling with her seeming fate to be a household servant; a whip-smart boy who grows up in the ghetto but seeks to know more about his mysterious origins; and a girl whose uncompromising love of her family's legacy leads her to gamble with her own life.
C.E. Morgan's writing has been compared to that of Marilynne Robinson and James Salter, and her ability to articulate moments fleetingly observed or sudden subtle changes in tenor and mood has a similar effect of mingled surprise and inevitability. This is writing that, even in its wildest and most southern-gothic moments, contains both the ring of truth and the thrill of discovery.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Sports, Animals, Historical, Novels

545 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2016

About the author

C.E. Morgan (b. 1976) is an American author. She won the 2016 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, among other honors.

As an undergraduate, Morgan studied voice at Berea College, a tuition-free labor college for students from poor and working-class backgrounds in Appalachia. In exchange for a free education, all students work for the college while enrolled. Morgan also attended Harvard Divinity School, where she studied literature and religion. She wrote All the Living while at Harvard. She lives in Kentucky.

Reviews

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off, I need to say that this is possibly THE most beautifully written book that I've had the pleasure to read. Powerful - Inspiring - and Moving words, and yet, these words also create vivid images of rape, slavery, and cruelty, that I found particularly hard to stomach. Of course these scenes and words were crucial to the overall picture, but you know what they say 'once read they cannot be unread'

The wealthy Forge family are one of the oldest families in Kentucky, descended from the first settlers to travel the harsh Wilderness Road. Henry Forge decides to break with the family tradition of crop farming in favour of horse racing and breeding, but don't let that put you off ( I have no knowledge or interest in either) and though paramount to the story, there is SO much more to this book. At around 600 pages it's a long read, but it's such a rich, all enveloping saga that reveals the complete circle of life in all it's sordid glory. I deliberately haven't given much of the story away as I think it's begging to be read. C E Morgan has created something of a masterpiece here, that I believe would transfer wonderfully to the big screen. It deserves an audience!

* Thank you to Netgalley and Harper Collins UK, 4th Estate for my ARC, in exchange for an honest and unbiased review*

[Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

My pick to win the 2016 Women's Prize. 🧡

Want to see my 16 Must Read Women's Prize Nominees on BookTube? Come join me at Hello, Bookworm.📚🐛



Click here to watch a video review of this book on my (old) channel, From Beginning to Bookend.



Henry Forge - proud, racist, and uncompromising - nurtures a lifelong obsession to breed the next Thoroughbred superhorse, a desire that his only child, Henrietta, adopts with the same degree of all-consuming fervor. Allmon Shaughnessy, a young black man adept at working with horses, arrives at the Forge farm. His appetite for success aligns with that of the Forge family, and the three are inextricably drawn together by their ambitions. The stakes are high and the cost is often too great in this epic multi-generational novel that beautifully blends history with fiction, racism with acceptance, and lust with love.

The Sport of Kings introduces three complex protagonists and gives substantial backstory for each character; when their stories finally collide readers have a firm grasp of the characters' personal baggage, secret longings, and desperate needs.

With compelling historical interludes, rich secondary and tertiary characters, and the careful weaving together of several poignant themes, The Sport of Kings rightfully deserves a spot among the Great American Novels. The author demonstrates unrelenting skill at crafting believable characterizations and painting florid portraits of the barbarism of horse racing and the decadence of the South.

The neighbor's tobacco plants extend as far as the boy can see, so that impossibly varying shades of green seem to comprise the known world, the undulating earth an expanse of green sea dotted only by black-ship tobacco barns, a green so penetrating, it promises a cool, fertile core a mile beneath his feet.

Myriad Thoroughbred horses come alive on the page, stunning in their form and magnificent for their powerful build. The horse races are both thrilling and distressing, so vividly rendered the reader holds tight to the reigns atop a determined horse and can hear hooves thundering, sense the animal's muscles rippling, and feel the cold sting of mud splattering one's face. It's easy to cheer those who cross the finish line and painful to mourn those who do not.

Two of the jocks sat in the mess of churned mud, crying like children over their broken horses where they lay, listening as the colt with the injured shoulder screamed.

Not only does this book touch on the cruelties of slavery, it delivers forthright testimony on the cascading effects of longstanding racism whose resonance has harmed multiple generations.

"The problem, Henry, as I have always seen it, is that the Negro is fundamentally a child, and children are incapable of understanding their own inferiority. Indeed, they generally err on the side of grandiose delusion. Mind you, the Negro is naturally playful, with a great capacity for joy, and I can appreciate that. But he's as self-pitying as he is playful, and like a child, he can despise you with as much passion in the evening as he loved and admired you in the morning."

Symbolism infuses countless pages, inciting conversation on the prevalence of bird cages and fertility in this book. With forced breeding that is tantamount to rape, beatings for non-compliant behavior, and the selling of horses and their young on the auction block, a fearless parallel is drawn between horse racing and slavery. Ever present is an underlying message of characters - human and animal alike - being trapped, feeling powerless, and longing for freedom.

She paused at the door and sighed. What did she know? That the horse has true and false floating ribs. That it has 205 bones in its body, the chestnuts on the backs of the limbs being remnants of the ancient horse alive in the modern; that, like a human, the horse sweats when it's nervous. That I am as trapped as any Thoroughbred.

The Sport of Kings is a book about grief, longing, and the defiant pursuit of one's passion. With skillful pacing and adroit character development, this contemporary novel glows with the triumphant light of a literary masterpiece.

[Jaline · Rating 5 out of 5]

No-one and nothing emerges unscathed in this book. Regardless of race or region, whether plant, animal, mineral – even the earth itself – all are capable of, and do enact cruelty upon other members of their species or other species or those in contact with other species. In that sense, this book was almost nihilistic in tone. Just when redemption appeared to be at hand, it was ripped away with the force of a wild wind.

It begins as a family saga in Kentucky when Kentucky was still Virginia then skips ahead several generations and the bulk of the story takes place in the 7th through to the start of the 10th generation. This book covers a lot of territory, and through “intervals”, (the shorter pieces between the main parts of the book), historical background, racial conflicts, geological background, and various published theories are introduced, and excerpts and tracts are later woven into the main story itself.

I used to love watching horses race – all the most spectacular racers of the last century and this century and their “best of” races are available on YouTube. Watching those horses fly and accomplish astounding feats of athleticism always brought tears to my eyes. Then at some point I saw a horse injured in a race. I won’t go into detail, but it was awful and tragic. Then I saw a documentary on the corruption, the doping, and other machinations within the “Sport of Kings” and I was shocked and appalled. I have never been able to watch since.

While this book does involve horse breeding - specifically for racing - and is centered on that theme, for me, the book itself is a metaphor for horse racing. In the flow of the book I could feel the different gaits of different breeds of horses, from the Walkers with their fancy steps to the Thoroughbreds running wild and free. The pace of the book and its vast reach into regional and global issues mimics the free range of horses in the wild: sometimes a slow and thoughtful walk, sometimes a canter through historical elements, and at other times a full gallop where the tension of your own muscles can be felt as you hold on for dear life.

For me, it was in the second interval where this book became a metaphor of itself. Reading it was like watching, or being part of the experience of 'breaking' a horse for riding. Bucking, twisting, turning, down on the ground, up again, and more bucking and bolting until, exhausted, it stilled.

The writing is superb and brings forth family and racial issues in an immediate, in-your-face way. In places it is like the staccato hoof beats of a racer; in other places it is slower paced and factual like a horse grazing. Many times it is uncomfortable and I didn’t want to go there – like a race horse loaded into a trailer for a road trip to yet another racetrack or to a training school. I wanted to kick and scream and get out of that trailer, yet a part of me knew I had to keep going.

Would I recommend this book? Yes. It is long (545 pages), it takes you to uncomfortable and even horrific places, but I believe it is a very important book for all of us and is a very good read – as well as a long and sometimes uncomfortable ride.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

3ish stars.

Allow me to compare this novel to a horse. It's large, majestic, impressive, stately. Many times, however, it more closely resembles a Clydesdale than the Forge's racing thoroughbreds- powerful but less sleek than clunky and plodding. I had this rated as high as a 4 at some points and as low as a 2 at others, which speaks to its inconsistency, mostly in pace. There were times I was so engaged and impressed with Morgan's writing skill, while other times I felt like I was slogging through a river of peanut butter.

Her talent is evident throughout- she somehow turns the startup horse-breeding farm of a single family into a monumental Greek tragedy. She makes what on paper is a slight story about a sport I don't really care about into an epic as expansive as America itself. She also confidently, boldly gives unique, believable voices to each of her diverse characters and makes each of them fascinating, even many of the secondary characters. The three main characters, Henry, Henrietta, and Allmon are all sufficiently studied on their own before they crash into each other, but I was disappointed to find that once they all came together I liked them better in isolation.

One criticism I can make of Morgan is that she comes dangerously close to over-writing. The pages are wrought with symbolism and soliloquy and it tends to escape her grasp. Regardless, this is only her second novel and I can appreciate that it deserves its Pulitzer nomination even if I didn't love it completely.

Posted in Mr. Philip's Library

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the opening scene, we meet young Henry on the run from his father for the crime of killing the neighbour’s bull. His strident denials, churlishness to a black servant, and childish whining did not initially endear me to him, or the book. Then we meet his father, an overbearing man whose impossibly high expectations of his son were unlikely to be met, for he seemed like the sort who would never be satisfied. Suddenly, the boy’s behaviour became a little more understandable, though never likeable. By page 23, I was all in. However, if I was hoping for Henry to grow up into a better man, I would have been bitterly disappointed. As an adult, he becomes a disturbing mix of his father’s faults and his own nature, a volatile combination.

In this, he is not alone. Each of the main characters have strong personalities, destined to crash repeatedly into each other by the very nature of their ties to the family, the land, and the horses. Their feelings of unhappiness manifest again and again through extreme acts of anger, vindictiveness, and jealousy. Rape, lynching, death; all form part of the savage fabric of the novel. The vehement racism that runs through the plot varies from the ‘uppity Negro’ type to the pseudo-intellectual/philosophical/biological justifications for the white man’s supremacy. And I mean, ‘man’. Women have their own, very specific, role to play in this society. As heir apparent, Henrietta’s grooming for the top position is framed from the outset as being taught not to be like other women.
The book is foremost about family, about lineage and blood ties. As with horses, genealogy and familial connections are imbued with meaning and expectation. The conflict, and inevitable catastrophe, is determined by the ways in which characters seek to subvert, or escape, the powerful chains these presumptions place on their lives.

To say the book is challenging is an understatement. It’s a complex and surprising read, never following the narrative patterns you expect. Latin quotations and Socratic style dialogues are followed by disturbing scenes of violence. The writing has its own gait, disparate elements herded by Morgan into a comprehensive whole. It is this that ensures it stands apart, and highlights the author as someone stretching the boundaries of form.

Many thanks to C. E Morgan, 4th Estate, and RealReaders for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an impressively wide-ranging novel that is almost a social history of Kentucky, as well as an examination of the racing industry and the science behind the evolution and breeding of thoroughbred horses. It centres on two families, one white and one black, and builds to a conclusion that has elements of Greek tragedy. I have no interest in horses, but never found that a problem.

At its heart is Henry Forge, whose family farm was founded by an ancestor who was one of the state's original settlers. He decides to defy his father's plans and establish a horse breeding farm to breed racing thoroughbreds. Much of the story centres on his daughter Henrietta, who becomes involved in the business and decides to employ Allmon, whose story is the other main thread, as a groom.

Allmon comes from a poor mixed race background in Cincinnati - his grandfather is the minister of a church and his mother struggles to keep her job because of a congenital illness and cannot afford medical treatment. He gets sucked into working for a local criminal gang and ends up in prison, where he eventually manages to learn about horses. To say much more than that about the plot would be spoilerish, but the conclusion is remorselessly bleak.

I came quite close to giving this a full five stars - it is undoubtedly a book packed with interesting ideas.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rumors of Great American Novel status abounded, but I found this Kentucky-based horse racing novel to be florid and overlong. The novel doesn’t really achieve takeoff until Allmon comes on the scene at about page 180. Although there are good descriptions of horses, the main plot – training Hellsmouth to compete in the 2006 Kentucky Derby – mostly passed me by. Meanwhile, the interpersonal relationships become surprisingly melodramatic, more fit for a late Victorian novel or maybe something by Faulkner. My favorite character was Maryleen, the no-nonsense black house servant. Henry himself, though, makes for pretty unpleasant company. Morgan delivers the occasional great one-liner (“Childhood is the country of question marks, and the streets are solid answers” and “They grow failure here [in jail] like flowers.”), but her prose is on the whole incredibly overwritten. There’s a potent message in here somewhere about ambition, inheritance and race, but it’s buried under an overwhelming weight of words.

See my full review at Nudge.

[Rincey]

It's never too late to DNF a book.

[RoseMary Achey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I enjoyed the writing style, the subject and characters were tedious and difficult to engage. A family saga concerned with a family that has few redeeming qualities. Every time I picked up this book, I wished for it to end, certainly not a glowing recommendation.

[Melissa Crytzer Fry · Rating 5 out of 5]

**I would give this book 10 stars if I could. **

[UPDATE (7/10): While prepping discussion questions for book club, I realized that I missed something KEY in this book -- a "holy cow, my mind is blown" kind of discovery that makes me feel this book is even MORE brilliant than my initial thoughts below. But you have to read closely, with focus, to catch it. Amazing, amazing, amazing!!]

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
What I’ve come to learn about myself as a reader is that I am patient enough (who knew?) to enjoy epic novels that span generations (This one was 545 pages). And I’m nerdy enough to enjoy puzzling out long, beautiful literary sentences that may ramble (This book does include some of those). I also enjoy gently-paced, character-driven stories with layered thematic complexity and metaphors/similes that are subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle (To me, a complex book that is more than JUST a story is like a breathtaking treasure hunt – digging for and finding symbolism and ferreting out recurring themes and assessing ambiguity, all while reading an engaging story).

This book offers all of those things and is magnificent on many levels – from the artistry of word choice to the gut-wrenching emotions lived through the pain of so many flawed characters. This is a story about history, about man’s thirst to dominate, about the pursuit of perfection and pleasure, about bigotry and judgement, about slavery in all its forms, about human-animal relationships, about betrayal, love and landscape, and family lineage. There are twists and turns toward the end of the book that will leave you gasping. You will be privy to information one of the main characters does not have, and you will be screaming (in your head, or aloud, as I was)… “No… Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” What a roller-coaster of emotion, but it’s more than that. This novel is a soul-searching meditation on issues of race and genetics and history and answering the question of whether that history can ever be rewritten. It’s a topic that appears to have been written for the very times in which we live; it is no surprise to me that this book was nominated for a Pulitzer and Kirkus Prize (and many others).

Horse racing, it turns out, is the perfect metaphor to parallel the themes of human breeding and genetics – and ties in well with another theme related to man’s blinding and often devastating ambition and his impact on the human and natural world.

I still marvel at the author’s ability to pull so many different stories, characters and themes into a cohesive narrative, with all the pieces fitting together at the end. You’ll find stories within stories – folktales and biblical references, spanning back five or so generations of this family and leading up to 2006. You’ll find yourself sometimes unsure of who the narrator is (sometimes the narrator is addressing you, the reader. Sometimes the narrator is addressing the characters. At one point, the narrator is even addressing the AUTHOR; sometimes the author inserts herself into the narrative “As sure as I write this…”), but – oddly, for me (a stickler for ‘rules’), that wasn’t an issue. It still ‘worked.’ And frankly, it was masterful!

I chose this book for our book club, so I anticipate a lot of whining when we discuss it on July 8– ha ha – regarding length, complexity of sentences, pacing … (I have mentioned in the past that I can forgive a book a multitude of sins if the sentences are dripping in rich description, if they transport me and if I can live in the skin of the characters, even if it may appear they “aren’t doing much.”) BUT I also am certain that this will be one of the books that generates the most discussion of any other books we’ve read. It’s that good. If my book club members come to the table disliking this book, I do believe I can win them over with MY love and appreciation of this novel and this author’s incredible talent. I believe I might have taken more notes on this book than any other I’ve ever read…

Read this book if 1) You’re into literary fiction and authors who use experimental/creative literary techniques 2) You don't need a plot that moves at breakneck speed from page one 3) You enjoy novels that tackle tough, tough moral issues and 4)You appreciate literary ambiguity that lets you draw your own conclusions. (Did I feel, at times, that an editor’s hand was needed to pare down some of the excessive descriptions? Yes. But did it detract from my overall feelings about this book? No! I want to go to Kentucky now, after the breathtaking descriptions.) Woo-wee … this one blew my socks off.

This book will make you think. In fact, I believe the author wrote with that intent, specifically. One line in the book states, "America has many ills, but none greater than the refusal of so many to think long and hard, to think critically. We must learn to be choosers, not merely receivers; to be self-critical; to cast a suspicious eye on the powers that be, including one's own unearned power. We want easy answers, but we must refuse them. The only true answer is to think." Yessss!

FINAL NOTE: I read the author’s slim debut, All the Living, which I adored. I will read ANYTHING this talented woman publishes. Check out Ms. Pegasus’s review for all the intriguing things I didn’t pick up on! I think this is one you could read and re-read and find new, hidden gems each time.

[Trudie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally, coming up for air after 2 weeks with this novel, an ambitious multigenerational epic, hampered by indulgent digressions.
Lets deal with the horses, yep, there are large chunks of writing about matters equine - breeding, racing, frolicking, and evolution but this is not a horse racing novel like, say Seabiscuit: An American Legend, but rather a confronting story of race and certainly privilege. Hellsmouth, the key horse character of the book, really doesn't feature heavily until the last third of the novel, and this strand seemed more like an allegory of slavery to me and less about a race horse. Certainly conflicting ideas about race percolate through the novel. It is shot through with tracts on Darwinian evolution, genetics and many other diversions of sometimes dubious relevance.
Other reviewers have mentioned this book feels nourished by authors like Faulkner and Melville - the transitions between relatively straight forward narrative and then sudden soliloquy, classical references, the wide ranging and sometimes fleeting characters. It is a very cerebral and confronting book and I applaud the attempt to capture something of the nature of race and the cascading consequences of history within a complex and yet very readable 550 pages.
However, I would have loved to see what a good editor could have done if they were allowed to reign in the excesses. Sometimes the momentum was lost under a deluge of what I call "stream of consciousness landscape description". I am sure 100 pages or more were devoted to the angle of sun through windows, light on the grass, cloud forms and the myriad of ways to describe the Ohio river.
In C.E Morgans own words
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 ?

Hmmmm well I am going to err on the side of YES on this one. And yet it is mostly forgivable.

(Also this is a great review from Dwight Garner in the NY Times

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/18... )

[Malacorda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il titolo, con la sua doppia valenza, racchiude in sé i temi del romanzo. Qual è questo sport praticato da re e regine? Ad una prima e sbrigativa occhiata si risponde con il primo di quei temi: l'equitazione, con tutto il suo corollario di gare, esposizioni, allevamento di esemplari nei quali si ricerca la perfezione attraverso una attenta selezione genetica. Ma se si osservano per alcuni minuti in più i re e le regine, con ciò intendendo non tanto, o comunque non soltanto i regnanti in senso stretto, ma più in generale coloro che si sentono élite, che si sentono depositari di più grandi ricchezze e qualità e virtù rispetto la media dell'umanità, e dunque osservando certe dinastie di industriali, finanzieri e politici (alla fin fine le tre cose non è che siano poi tanto distinte) si noterà che la selezione finalizzata al raggiungimento della perfezione non avviene solo sui loro cavalli o magari sui loro cani, ma avviene proprio su loro stessi: con amore per la famiglia sopra ogni cosa, praticamente a livelli da cosca mafiosa, perpetuare la dinastia e dotarla di eredi sempre più degni e perfetti, sublimare le caratteristiche intrinseche che si trovano al suo interno ed escludere qualsiasi possibilità di inquinamento che possa giungere da un qualche elemento esterno.
Ed è così che l'orgoglio per la propria famiglia, il dovuto e sacrosanto rispetto per i propri avi, e tante altre belle cose come l'attaccamento alla terra o all'azienda e comunque sia al lavoro, l'etica della fatica e compagnia cantante, diventano tutti ingredienti per cucinare una minestra sofisticata che però poi alla fine ha lo stesso identico sapore di quell'altra sbobba ben conosciuta con il nome di razzismo.
Inutile negarlo, fa parte dei ragionamenti di tutti i giorni: la purezza è infinitamente più attraente della mescolanza. Si guarda con più ammirazione un bel purosangue inglese piuttosto che un qualsiasi ronzino (ignorando che alla fin fine anche il primo è risultato di un'ibridazione). Quando si parla di cani si dice sempre che il bastardino è più simpatico e più intelligente e campa più a lungo, ma già quel vezzeggiativo di "bastardo" cela in modo goffo e insufficiente il fatto che lo si sta comunque vedendo posizionato un gradino al di sotto rispetto l'esemplare dotato di pedigree. L'animale umano non fa eccezione: i caucasici chiamano "marocchino" qualsiasi persona con pelle un po' più scura, i marocchini chiamano "cioccolatino" colui che proviene dall'Africa Subsahariana, e via discorrendo, non oso immaginare con quali termini i subsahariani possano indirizzarsi ai bianchi nei discorsi che fanno tra di loro.

Ho cercato di definire la cornice all'interno della quale si espongono i temi del romanzo, ma credo di essere stata insufficiente. Razze equine, razze umane, razzismo; ma ci sono anche tanta Natura (vista in chiave più scientifica che poetica, ma tant'è, poi anche la scienza finisce per diventare un po' poesia), tanta Storia, americana ovviamente; e ancora la miseria e la voglia di rivalsa, la voglia disperata di realizzare il proprio sogno, quella cosa che oggi conosciamo bene con il termine american dream; il tutto esposto in maniera aggraziata e per niente pacchiana, come invece spesso accade quando qualche americano si prova a raccontarlo, questo american dream.
C.E. Morgan racconta il Kentucky, lo stato in cui vive, ma lo fa con un'impostazione a mio avviso decisamente ibrida, a metà strada tra la letteratura americana e quella europea e questo mi ha permesso di apprezzarla ben più di quel che solitamente mi succede con gli autori americani contemporanei. E proprio come il cavallo citato sopra, la formula di ibridazione si rivela vincente e questa scrittrice va come un fulmine al suo traguardo. Sospetto che se avessi letto I Buddenbrook potrei trovare un sacco di elementi che pongono in parallelo le due opere, ma Mann non l'ho ancora letto e quindi posso solo ripromettermi di colmare la lacuna e poi tornare in un secondo momento a fare i miei paragoni. Il paragone con Moby Dick, come riportato da una citazione del Guardian, non è fuori luogo: Melville rimane lassù sull'Olimpo ma quest'opera è talmente completa e ben strutturata che scomodarlo due minuti per fare il confronto non sarebbe cosa blasfema.
McCarthy, tanto per dirne un altro, con tutti i suoi discorsi diretti e scarni e la violenza della vita raccontata attraverso dettagli un po' splatter, e cowboys sedicenni scafati come quarantenni e i suoi tramonti insanguinati, beh, secondo me resta tre gradini al di sotto di questa ragazza della quale non sono nemmeno riuscita a scovare il nome per esteso, quindi accontentiamoci di questo striminzito C.E., intanto la sostanza non è nei nomi ma nei fatti, e il fatto è che la ragazza ha scritto un gran bella epopea americana e i tramonti li sa descrivere dieci volte meglio. Forse non sarà Il Grande Romanzo Americano in assoluto (o forse sì? Non sono io a poterlo stabilire) ma di sicuro con il suo incedere entra in top ten e si candida alla grande per il podio.

Oltre alla Storia americana, con i pionieri che avanzano verso la frontiera, nella formula del romanzo c'è anche un taglio decisamente attuale: in questa foga della purezza della famiglia, e in questo padre che stravede in maniera esagerata per la figlia, io ci vedo un riferimento neanche tanto velato ai Trump. Nel romanzo, la figlia nasce lo stesso anno della scrittrice: suppongo dunque ci possa essere almeno un qualche tratto autobiografico, magari camuffato immezzo al resto o addirittura esposto al rovescio come in un negativo.

Partendo dall'America profonda, passando per discriminazione, razzismo e genetica si giunge così a riflettere sul tema dell'origine dell'individuo: curioso come questo tema si rincorra - pur involontariamente - nelle mie letture: L'Oratorio di Natale di Tunström, poi Meccanica Celeste di Maggiani, e ora questo. La Morgan sembra propendere per la tesi di Maggiani nel senso che anche secondo il suo romanzo siamo tutti un po' orfani (tutti i protagonisti, in un modo o nell'altro, più o meno realistico, resteranno senza madre). E al tempo stesso non rinnega nemmeno la "tesi dell'unicum" di Tunström perché la genetica dimostra qui di aver un ruolo preponderante. I personaggi proposti dalla Morgan sono tutti affascinanti e avvincenti anche quando si comportano in modo orribile, e questa è sempre una carta vincente in un romanzo. Nessuno uscirà illeso da questa centrifuga: indipendentemente da ogni premessa, dalla razza e dalla specie di appartenenza, di torti e colpe e peccati e presunzioni ce n'è a iosa per tutti. Quel che ne esce è un ritratto di America decisamente pessimista (l'unico personaggio, secondario tra l'altro, che realizzerà veramente il suo sogno e aspirazione sarà colei che lascerà il Sud per fuggire a gambe levate verso New York, la Est Coast come l'altra faccia della luna), un ritratto pessimista eppure non nichilista. La quarta di copertina dice che "la sola speranza di redenzione può venire da un poderoso sforzo d'amore" ma in verità non è questo che il romanzo espone. Più che la legge dell'amore direi che alla fine si vede prevalere la legge per cui le colpe dei padri ricadono sui figli e anche la legge per cui gli errori commessi dai padri vengono ripetuti uguali identici anche dai figli. Dicesi, per l'appunto, genetica.

A cascata, parlando di origine dell'individuo, si finisce per parlare di argomenti a latere quali la famiglia, il sesso, la condizione femminile, qui tutti esposti in maniera ordinata e pertinente.
Diversamente da altri romanzi in cui la scena (o fosse anche solo l'idea) dell'incesto viene sbattuta lì senza che se ne sappia bene il percome né il perché (o meglio, si sa che il perché è spesso solo il gusto di inserire il dettaglio torbido e scabroso), qui invece la cosa ha un suo senso e un contesto. Nell'ambito del tema della famiglia il riferimento a Edipo è alquanto evidente, e nell'ambito dei temi della razza e della genetica si vuole provocatoriamente affiancare all'argomento della consanguineità negli accoppiamenti con cui si cerca di perfezionare l'esemplare equino. E allo stesso modo si porta avanti anche un abbinamento tra i discorsi sul colore della pelle umana e quelli sul colore del manto equino.

Altre assonanze in ordine sparso: il caso ha voluto che proprio mentre iniziavo questa lettura, in televisione abbiano trasmesso il film con la storia del cavallo Seabiscuit: è una storia, quella di quel cavallo, che può ben rappresentare l'antefatto, per quanto occulto, di questo romanzo. Si parte nella stessa città, Lexington, e il figlio del proprietario terriero e coltivatore Forge si farà venire la mania dei cavalli sognando proprio di quella nuova moda che impazza durante la sua giovinezza, le gare con i cavalli, una mania in cui lui vuole leggere il futuro e il rinnovamento e in cui suo padre vede invece la disgrazia in quanto inottemperanza alla tradizione e rischio di fallimento. Quest'altro tema del contrasto tra tradizione e rinnovamento mi ha ricordato sia i Fratelli Ashkenazi che il film Il Gigante.

La voce narrante cambia di frequente, non è sempre immediatamente identificabile ma per lo più si trova nella testa dei personaggi, e ad essa si aggiunge ulteriormente la voce della scrittrice stessa con qualche divagazione che esula dalla trama in senso stretto. A questo lato più indefinito della narrazione sopperisce però brillantemente la struttura del romanzo che propone un capitolo per ogni personaggio e consente così al lettore di mantenere il focus sullo stesso oggetto su cui si sta concentrando l'autrice.

E' una grande epopea, come quella di Via col vento, che mette in evidenza un passaggio di grandi cambiamenti; e proprio come la Mitchell, anche la Morgan sa creare personaggi a tutto tondo, che non sono né postivi né negativi, sono e basta.
Aspetti negativi di questa lettura? Ci sono, ma trascurabili. Qualche banalità nella scena del parto; un po' di auto-compiacimento in certe digressioni e divagazioni che però non vanno mai comunque troppo per le lunghe; e un finale un tantino fumoso ma a ben pensarci non poteva essere altrimenti: questa epopea ha inizio nel XIX sec. e porta il racconto fino al 2005-2006 o giù di lì, ma il vero finale deve ancora essere scritto (e qui mi viene da sospirare: poveri noi, quando verrà scritto). Voto 4 stelle e mezza: forse i dettagli andranno a sbiadire, ma le atmosfere di questa lettura mi resteranno certo impresse a lungo.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. The best book I've read this month. This was so close to 5 stars but that epilogue hmmm.

This is thankfully not a book about horse racing despite the title. It is a sweeping epic family story and a reckoning with the history of slavery in US. The horses are beautiful but they are just the backdrop. I will be carrying these characters around with me for a long time.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an overwritten mess, which is a shame, because there were flashes of brilliance and some heartpoundingly page-turning passages. I get that this is Southern Gothic, and that the footsteps being followed are Faulkner's, but I was frustrated by the excess long before I reached the turgid melodramatic ending.

An early warning sign was the recurrence of esoteric vocabulary words. The first time I saw "karsty" (which may be an adjective that Morgan coined, I'm not sure), I had to read up on karst. OK, I guess. But the 20th or so time that karsty appeared it started to seem like an affectation. So too with the untranslated Latin, the extensive disquisitions on geology, the occasional seemingly random eruption of an authorial voice. It's not that I'm uniformly against these things, or that I'm for the dumbing down of literature, but when you pile everything into one overlong book, it starts to seem like showing off or trying too hard, or both.

While the treatment of slavery and race pulls no punches, and the horse scenes are absolutely riveting (and I don't even like horses much), I ended up feel uncomfortable with the plot overall. There was just something squicky about the way the main black character was handled - his misery in every respect was so overdetermined and his objectification as an object of white lust made me queasy. (I get that Morgan's telling a story about a trope or a stereotype, but I didn't think the stereotype was deconstructed or explored enough to get me past the ick factor). And the book's women mostly just get sexually abused and then die.

But overall I just felt like Morgan got in her own way. She has the stuff of a very compelling novel here, but the endless digressions and embroidery (the jockey who speaks in Shakespearean monologues was particularly annoying in this regard) made me impatient more than awed.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bloodstock: Overbred, Overwritten

C. E. Morgan can do some things supremely well. There is a scene about a quarter of the way through her new novel, set mainly on a Kentucky horse farm, where a stud stallion is brought in to cover a brood mare. The bringing together of two highly-strung animals, attracted by scent, and as likely to attack their handlers as each other, is a scene of gross violence made almost magnificent by the wildness of the writing in which Morgan describes it:

The enormous bay stallion rounded the wall of the breeding shed between his two handlers, his tremendous bulk eclipsing much of the early sunlight and casting the shed into abrupt shadow. As soon as the pliant musk of estrus reached his nostrils, he sank into his quarters, the muscles of his flanks trembling spasmodically, the phallus beginning to protrude from its sheath. His dished head traced small circles in the air as he eyed the mare. She, in turn, twisted away from the trammel of the lead shank to find him, her nostrils widening as her hooves danced on the tan-bark floor.

The scene, which takes six pages in all, is absolutely central not only to the working world of the book but also to its theme, which is the breeding of bloodstock, whether animal or human. Against all custom, the owner, Henry Forge, insists on being present too, further ratcheting up the tension. And he uses it as a lesson for his teenage daughter, Henrietta; that too is central to the theme.

Contrast a parallel scene, symmetrically placed in the later part of the novel. This is a birth—not the mare delivering her foal (though we see that too), but a human labor. It is not the actual scene I want to quote, but something from the dozen pages leading up to it, a bubbling cauldron of nightmare fantasy, history, philosophy, and brute realism [Warning: this quotation contains obscenities]:

Back in the halcyon days of her ignorance, her monthly period had been only a nuisance. Her pussy like something she had invented—sui generis. There's no business like my business! But, pregnancy shattered the illusion like so much cheap mercury glass. What differentiates man from animal is deferral of appetite. And here was the real silver that turned the blood blue: Each menstrual period was a bright reminder, a clotted reminder, a libation to the gods on behalf of every child unborn, those quietly waiting in the hidden place where the waiting gather. Woman was a tensile thing stretched taut between generations. So no fucking was casual and, further, there was no such thing as a free body in this world, our occasional choices laughably, infinitesimally rare. Each was born squalling and covered in blood with a bill coming due in her clenched hand, her tiny ovaries constellated with potential life, floating there in the warm, watery dark. The world, in fact, existed.

I have two reasons for quoting this scene; for now, I want to talk only about style, the flights of wild fancy that Morgan embarks on here and countless times elsewhere. She can certainly write, she knows she can write, and even when she mocks her tendency to overwrite, she does so with conscious pride in her own virtuosity:

Or is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much—the world and the words? Or 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.

I almost abandoned the novel in its first pages, wondering if I could take the continued onslaught of overcolored epithets and baroque phrasing. But I persevered, and discovered that when the drama in her story is natural and organic—no matter how intense, as in the breeding shed—Morgan's language mostly keeps pace with it. For me, the strongest of the six parts was the third, the only one not set in Kentucky at all, about the coming of age of a black boy in Cincinnati in the 1990s. So real were his problems in losing his preacher grandfather, trying to care for his sick mother, and stay on the right side of the law, that the story needed no special help from the words; text fitted content like a glove. And even when the purple passages resumed, I recalled that other great writers whom I admire—William Faulkner, for instance—also used highly charged language. But Faulkner did it for a purpose, to give his writing epic scope, commensurate with the history of the American South and the original sin of slavery. Does Morgan have such a purpose too?

Yes, but it seems forced. The dozen or more pages of extreme writing leading up to that birth scene are there because the situation itself is extreme. Without giving away the plot, let me only say that no one knows whose child this will turn out to be. Of the two main possibilities, one is socially beyond the pale and the other is morally outrageous. Here again, I almost threw down the book in disgust—not at the behavior of the characters, but that the author would so blatantly engineer the situation to make her thematic point, and jack up the language so that the obscene would seem epic. She is no longer concerned with character and plausibility, but with the troubled history of a people, race, lineage… bloodstock, in short. Faulkner might have handled it, or Steinbeck in his melodramatic East of Eden mode. Morgan is not in their league, though you can see her trying to be.

Nowhere did the fundamental contradictions in the novel emerge more clearly than in the last 150 pages. There continue to be many exciting set-pieces for sure, including horse-race scenes that make even this non-aficionado rise to his feet in the stands. And the short final part contains moments of simple grace, as the baby changes the life of his grandfather in beautiful ways. But overlaid on it all is the sense of the author grabbing at the organ stops almost at random, to build a great crescendo out of words, words, words:

I am the devil's midwife, the Messiah come in shape no bigger than a black man's fist in the face of the Kentucky colonel man. Drawn darker than a stub of burnt cork, he straddles the black brain as it sleeps awake. His silks are sound from the pickers' jubilee; the fine helmet of the overseer's skull; reins from the braids of white bitch bitties; black boots from the flays of baying blackwater hounds; his crop snatched from the Southern whipping hand, its handle fashioned from fingers that when felled, grabbed up Mississippi mud like velvet cake.

And so on for forty lines. Sound familiar? It is in fact a version of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet in the voice of a gay jockey drunk on his own words. But the transposition is more than showing off. It is part of Morgan's insistence that this is a Great American Novel about the most shameful subject of all, race. Although actually spanning only the lifetime of one man, Henry Forge, it has the referential scope of an epic, beginning with the first settlers coming over the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap. It takes in the legacy of the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, urban poverty, police and prison abuses, and the 2001 Over-the-Rhine riots in Cincinnati. It even retells the story of Adam and Eve, with further reference to Cain and Abel, Ham, and Ishmael. I understand that Morgan wants this to be a big book, but the further she goes to prove her point, the further she gets from the natural working-out of her story in terms of character and human feeling. It works so long as you keep believing in the grand manner. But once you lose that belief, forget Faulkner; the novel's plunge into total tragedy at the end will just seem like the arbitrary melodrama of Southern Gothic at its worst.

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is supposedly only 500 something pages, but it took me more than three weeks to get through the audiobook. phew. i am so very happy i did, except for what i found a disappointing and sadly predictable finale.

it's not many women writers who take it upon themselves to write such sprawling, male histories of the country, or, as they are called if men write them, Great American Novels, so major props to morgan for courage and vision.

also, it's not many white people who tackle race so head-on, and, above all, put the spotlight on whiteness. i can't think of any white american author other than c.e. morgan who has written a book about whiteness. it would have been better in my opinion if she had analyzed whiteness more and blackness less. lots of black authors analyze blackness but, as i said, whiteness seems pretty much a non-race in our collective mind, which makes it of course not a subject for analysis. it is strong and brave to delve deeply in what it means to be white. (whiteness is as much a race as blackness is and not, as all of us sort of think, some with more qualms than others, the default way of being human).

the first part of this sprawling novel is about how white farmers drifting on the large empty american land in the 18th century, looking for a place to settle down and make a living, turn into revered patriarchs and founders of a noble lineage of blue-bloodedness at the end of the 20th (actually a lot sooner). the name, the name! the blood line, the blood line! this name and this blood line are naturally earned over the unpaid toil and silent violation of countless black bodies.

the second part is about a black family in cincinnati -- mostly about how if you are black you don't get a chance, ever. in fact, any chance you get is automatically zapped and trampled on and taken away from you in as demeaning, brutal, and definitive way as possible.

this second part is long and the story within may not have been morgan's to tell. i prefer to read about the endless suffering of black folks from black folks, for all sorts of reasons not the least of which is that it should be black storytellers who put their names on the book's cover and reap the royalties from the stories of their vilified and downtrodden ancestors. also, a black author is living proof that misery and blackness are not automatically conjoined, which they are not, and not, and not. the myth of the poor negro may move hearts but does not encourage change.

having said this, though, i need to say also that morgan is a fantastic writer, quite in control of her subject matter, and immensely gifted with language, erudition, and originality. even though this books received great accolades, i don't see her buying herself a loft in manhattan with the profits from it any time soon. in fact, the book is written quite esoterically and strangely, and it is truly a labor of love. (its daring language, length, and handling of material reminded me a little of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies).

horse racing, the novel's ostensible subject matter, comes in only at the end, and works more as an extended metaphor for inbreeding, pure bloodedness, and bloodedness in general than as a subject in its own merit. it is however dealt with in a lovely and sensitive way, and if you like horses and don't hate horse racing enough to be unable to read about it, this book will please you.

i would have given The Sport of Kings an enthusiastic five star rating were it not for the defeat, doom, and tragedy that befall allman, the black protagonist, at the end. we don't need our fictions to insists on the heinous stereotype of the black man who goes ballistic and shoots up everyone. that left me cold and chilled. also, while i am at it, what is with dispatching the few woman the book introduces so swiftly? other than that, this is quite a fascinating and gorgeous work of literature.

[Kathleen McKim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is offensive. I can only hope the reader will read past his or her objections. It is offensive to blacks, to monied whites, to animal rights activists, to horse-racing enthusiasts, to atheists, to Christians, to hillbillies and a combination of any or all of the above. I loved every minute of it. This book gets in your face and into your brain. Morgan takes Homeric and idyllic pastoral scenes to an entirely new level in the modern novel. The writing is lush, but accurate to every detail. I heard echoes of Milton and Shakespeare in the cadence of the language. The Southern Gothic has been resurrected, only Faulkner has moved to Kentucky, where the idea of the Old South has been both manufactured and maintained by families who imagine themselves as monied, but whose lives are but a gamble. It's a Williams play, had he written a saga. Descriptions of mountains are straight from Robert Penn Warren, Wendell Berry, Kingsolver. The story of slaves an amplified Harriet Beecher Stowe. The sense of generations from Lee Smith. This is one of the richest novels I've read in a long time, whose characters filled my dreams. The stream of conscious/unconscious evolution, Darwinian, point toward the paradox of order in disorder. I wonder if readers who are not "from there" will get it. I've been there, I know the roads and towns. I've seen the horse farms and tracks. I've eaten Derby pie and drunk mint juleps. I sincerely hope this book enters the canon of modern American literature. The author seems to me, much like the filly Hellsmouth, finely honed as a champion.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

All roads have led to you, Henry, and I won't have you throw everything away for a heap of rhinestones. I'm a planter's son, and you're a planter's son. There is no need for improvement, Henry, only adherence to a line that has never altered, because it's never proven unsound.

The Sport of Kings is a tough book to get my mind around: It is big and weighty, so interesting at the sentence level and ambitious in scope – Is there ever anything more topical in America than class and race and the cultural residues of slavery? – but it is also undeniably overwritten, a little self-pleased, and ultimately, I was left uncomfortable, wondering if this was truly author C. E. Morgan's story to tell: From the perspectives of both white, old money Kentucky horse breeders and an inner-city black youth (to neither of which groups does Morgan herself belong), I constantly had the sense of the author projecting cliched values and motivations onto these characters; white people are bad and black people are good, and as the mechanics of the novel form require characters to transform, we end with enlightened white people and a black man who is forced to give up on playing by the white man's rules of civility and earthly justice; and while we might all nod at the former – poor little rich folks needed to learn some tolerance – I rather recoiled at the latter. Over a hundred and fifty years ago, it took a white woman to write Uncle Tom's Cabin in order to stir up the abolitionist movement, but today, I tend to the belief that the black experience is for black writers to tell; I don't think a person of colour would have concluded this book in this manner. If I was in a book club, this is what I would most want to discuss; yet, it was ultimately worth reading for the negatives as well as the positives.

These imperfect little fillies would be protected, coddled, and prized in aeternum if they proved themselves in the sport of kings – what strange luck to be a thoughtless horse. What woman could hope for half as much in this world?

On the one side, The Sport of Kings traces the life of Henry Forge – from his childhood under the racist traditionalist John Henry (who forbade his dreamy son from transforming the family's former plantation into a garish horsebreeding concern, in perpetuity), through Henry's efforts to breed a Derby winner, to his controlling relationship with his own heir, Henrietta – and throughout, the most important thing is lineage: not only is Henry forever reminded of his duty to his own forefathers (back to Samuel Forge who first surveyed and claimed their farm's edenic acres), but with frequent insertions of information about genetics and evolution, both the possibility of in-line breeding to create a perfect Thoroughbred and the purported inferiority of the Negro-genotype are stressed. There is an unsubtle (and not unwarranted) connection made between Henry's present day obsession with breeding horses for prestige and his forefathers' with breeding slaves for wealth, and the racism that Henry espouses seems bred in the bone. Much is made of the idea of freedom – Henry isn't free to follow his own dreams, ex-slaves thought they wanted freedom but “didn't know what to do with it”, throughout the generations, women had the least freedom of all – and there's such irony in the idea of horses (a powerful symbol of freedom) being the new slaves; tethered and fettered; put to work on the racetrack at the risk of their own bodies; suffering the sting of the whip.

They told him that he could rub horses, pull himself up by his bootstraps, distinguish himself, play the sport of kings. He wasn't naïve or romantic, he saw through it pretty quickly: horse is just a different kind of drug, horse is heroin. See, the rich hustle too, but they think their gambling is just a game without real consequences.

On the other side, The Sport of Kings focuses on Allmon Shaughnessy: the only son of a chronically ill black mother (and absent white father), Allmon grew up on the poorest streets of Cincinnati; what was once the promised land – a first point of freedom on the underground railroad – is now a place with so few opportunities and institutionalised racism that as a boy, he had no choice but to join a gang of thugs and do whatever it took to get by. Eventually sent to prison where he was trained as a groom, Allmon is hired on at Forge Run Farms by the mischievous Henrietta, and events are put into motion that marry classic tragedy to the Southern Gothic; there will be cosmic justice seen on this lot first tilled by the sweat of slaves.

The third most important character in The Sport of Kings would be the state of Kentucky itself: once the wild frontierland of Daniel Boone fame, much is made of its situation on the border between North and South; a supposedly morally nebulous middleground that the former slaveowners tried to exploit for instant respectability in the wake of reunification (“At least we ain't Mississippi.”) Morgan intricately describes the state, from the cities to the pastureland to the hill country, and we learn all about both its diverse geography and its storied history (and not least of all, its close proximity to freedom for the runaway slave: if only one reached the banks of the Ohio River, liberty was just a strong swim away). Often, Morgan breaks off the narrative with flights of Cormac McCarthyesque musings, and while perhaps too numerous, I thought they were well done:

Everything fell away, and the sky rode down a thousand feet like the falcon dropping. No ease here, toeing the crystalline seam of firmity and nothing. And then the sense came, intuited perhaps for the first time, that the earth itself was predatory, inbuilt with dangers, and it suddenly made sense why people wanted to pave it and smother it and sell it to render it simple past. Maybe they saw the beauty, maybe they could look out here to the west and admire the old knobs, the soft, bosomy remnants of the mountains, so lush in the soothing sunshine, but their genetic memory was far-reaching and wise and avenging. They knew the beauty of the earth rendered a fugue state, and while they gazed in blissful wonder, forgetting their own names and the names of their children, they froze in the Arctic chill and died of pustulent boils and rotting diseases, and sometimes they drowned or burned like bugs under glass or died of exposure, and some fell. So tamp the earth, burn the earth, pave the earth with abandon. Of course they did. Of course they would. It was their only revenge upon this wild, heartless theater.

And at the close-up level, I was consistently charmed by the descriptions of small moments:

After a half minute's pause, he turned the knob and pressed the old door as his mother bent behind him, so two light heads peered samely round the jamb.

So, there are these huge themes, playing out like a classical tragedy in which every wheel will turn back on itself eventually, and along the way, there is much social commentary – it wasn't lost on me that a lame horse gets instant, expensive veterinary care while the working poor suffer through debilitating infirmity due to lack of medical insurance – and Morgan, in an already long book, breaks off the narrative frequently in order to insert authorial asides (in which I don't think she, herself, is meant to be this author; perhaps the whole thing is the tell-all promised by one of the characters), streams of consciousness, modernist digressions of factual information, and inter-chapter breaks containing folk tales, biographies, and standards of the Jockey Club; I can understand how the overweighted whole might strain a reader's patience. The main point seems to be that the persistent racism of the Forges of America – people whose forebears once owned slaves will always need to justify it, protecting their family names, by insisting on the basic inferiority of African-Americans – along with biased legal and judicial systems, all railroad the objects of their prejudice into acting like stereotypes; thereby perpetuating the stereotypes. This is taken to such an extreme in this book that I didn't end up quite believing it; and, again, I got the uncomfortable sense that this wasn't Morgan's story to tell. And yet...Morgan can certainly write; I delighted in the trees if not the forest. I would definitely continue to read her work as she matures into her talent.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Forge is heir to a Kentucky farm, descended from the first settlers in the area, and son of a beautiful but mute mother and a fiercely proud, patrician and fundamentally racist and sexist father who disinherits him (unsuccessfully) when Henry declares his intention to convert the farm from crops to racehorses.

Most of the book of the book is set years later as Henry and his unmarried daughter Henrietta pursue Henry’s dream of breeding a triple-crown winning racehorse from the bloodline of one of his early champions. To Henry’s disgust Henrietta employs a part-black/part-Irish ex-convict Allmon on the farm. Although Henry cannot help acknowledging Allmon’s skills with horses and in particular with his great hope Hellsmouth, he is disconcerted by the relationship Allmon forges with Henrietta and strikes a deal for Allmon to leave the farm and assist as a personal groom to Hellsmouth in exchange for a share of Hellsmouth’s winnings.

Horse-racing is integral to the story - lengthy passages describe horse training, breeding and riding and various races serve as dramatic and involved set pieces, bringing the world of top-class horse-racing to life with the anorexic jockeys, unprincipled trainers and champion horses in-bred to the extent that their thirst for racing goes beyond the physical limits of their bodies.

However at the same time it is clearly a device that Morgan uses to examine the real themes of the book: inequality and greed, racism, breeding/natural selection, destiny and inheritance (both of wealth and poverty), slavery and its enduring and terrible effects through the generations.

Another key parts of the book is the natural world, geography and geology of Kentucky – described in lengthy and at times over-elaborate detail. As an example, the sun rising is described as

Over her drowsy head, the daily war of morning ensued: dews rose, shrugging off their sleep and skimming briefly over the fields in the shifting dark. After a long night of sleep in the underbelly of the earth, the armoured sun rose and charged the horizon, pressing against the dark with long arms until night fell back, wounded and floundering to earth’s antipodal edge. Now the lingering armies of dew turned to mist

Morgan directly addresses the reader during one such passage, asking rhetorically

Or is 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?

And then answering her own question (one that this reader is still struggling to answer)

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 the aurora borealis and the redundancies of the night skies …..

Set alongside these reflections on the natural world, are lengthy and often harrowing passages on Allmon’s life: his mother’s death from lack of ability afford medical care, his own drift into drug crime and the hell of his time in prison, as well as sections on the terrifying and tragic escape from slavery to the free states of one of his ancestors.

Henrietta’s reading is non-fictional based (largely, at a guess, based around the research that Morgan herself must have carried out for the novel – horse breeding, evolution, geology – and which she often examines in detail.

We are told:

She [Henriettta] read no novels finding them a waste of time. She resisted how they worked on her, asking her to suffer on someone else’s behalf. If they had no madness in them, they were useless; genius doesn’t speak with the limited tongue of sense

And in some ways Morgan has introduced her own elements of madness into this novel: Henry’s obsession with breeding a pure bloodline which he is not prepared to restrict to the equine world, but also to his own descendants; Allmon’s rage at his own loss, ruinous ambition to somehow make a fortune and join those who have taken everything from him, and then his thirst for revenge when he realises that even his ambition has been taken away.

While perhaps not quite “genius”, and while clearly at times over-written and over-ambitious as well as overly melodramatic in its ending, this is nevertheless a hugely ambitious, powerful and affecting novel.

[Maria Hill AKA MH Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has split me in two.

I love it: Its is a 4.5 star.
Look there is some beautiful writing here. For example there is a stunning scene where one of the female protagonists has sex with a stranger in the back seat of a car during a rain storm. The two family sagas are intriguing too with an interesting twist or two at the end.

I hate it. It should be a DNF and does not even deserve a single star.
Unfortunately, at there is at least two hundred pages of complete self- indulgent, convoluted, overwritten mess. When a molecular biologist is bored by Genetics, trust me it was bring.

So overall a DNF worthy book saved from time to time by flashes of brilliance. If someone crafty editor would get their hands on it an cut out 50% of the text – there may actually be a great book buried somewhere below.

In my opinion it did not deserve its place on the Bailey's short list and I will be most disappointed if it wins.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got about a hundred pages into this and just couldn't take any more of the grim, dour characters. Even the livelier ones are soured somehow.
The writing is good, though perhaps there's just too much of a good thing with it at times, as though the author finds a wondrous turn of phrase and can't bear not to add it to the other similar phrases, and the characters are well drawn enough. But everyone's so gloomy.
Just not interested in spending any more of my precious reading time with them all.

[Ms.pegasus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morgan's novel is set in the Ohio-Kentucky borderland bisected by the Ohio River. To the north lies Cincinnati, a free-state beacon in antebellum times. To the south lies the rich farmland of Kentucky, a de facto slave state. Metaphor has glossed over so much of this area's complicated history. Cincinnati was the Queen City, surrounded like Rome, by seven hills. Kentucky is the blue grass state, an appellation that distances it from reminders of slave labor's importance in its history. As for the Ohio River, it is easy to look at a map and liken it to the River Jordan crossing into the “Promised Land.” Morgan probes in ruthless detail the realities that contradict these glib references. The river itself was icy and treacherous with its swift-running currents. Even its reliable westward flow was contradicted. In 1812 the New Madrid earthquakes precipitated shifts that caused the river to flow backward, flooding its banks. In Cincinnati racism was alive in new guises. Kentucky was settled by Virginian planters moving westward with their slaves.

Morgan is a meticulous writer. Even the title of her book cloaks ironies. The sport of kings is horse racing, but the book is about race. The epithet has grandiose connotations. The reality is quite the opposite. None of the three foundation sires of the modern thoroughbred (the Godolphin Arabian, the Darley Arabian, and the Byerly Turk) were ever owned by kings. Racing was the one venue in England where commoners and aristocrats rubbed shoulders. The wealth lay not in the sport of racing, but in gambling and in the breeding shed. The “kings” were aspirational. Blood lines rather than serfs or slaves fueled the machinery of wealth. Morgan links the notion of kings and slave-owners explicitly. At one point Henrietta, eight generations removed from the family's founding patriarch Samuel Forge, contemplates her history: “...[S]he couldn't quite figure how she and her father were any different from the kings of coal who sent miners underground, who underpaid and overworked them, who sentenced ...them to suffer necrotic lives and basic want.” (Location 3083) Morgan links slaves and horses in a more subtle fashion.

Morgan subjects the notion of kingship and kingdoms to other types of scrutiny as well. The words suggest immutable abstractions, not the historical truth of their rise and fall. With stealthy creativity, Morgan invokes the lessons of biology. Henrietta has developed a deep interest in evolution and is a careful reader of Darwin. She is led to a consideration of Linnaeus' taxonomy. Originally, there were two kingdoms, the plant and the animal. Kingdom Monera was invented to accommodate bacteria; Kingdom Protista accommodated algae. Immutability is a fiction, Henrietta concludes: “...[E]very new life contains mutations — so the potential is always there for more. There should be 6 billion kingdoms on earth.” (Location 2824) How is this heretical? The whole racial narrative had been crafted around the idea of an immutable social order. The very idea contradicts the accepted breeding canon that her father had applied to his horse breeding operation as well. Breed and interbreed to create the perfect race horse. “Breeding a line back to its own line can produce the perfect horse — and that's worth every risk.” (Location 2460)

Even the word 'sport' is open to analytic conjecture. In biology a sport is the kind of genetic anomaly Henrietta is extolling. Ironically, Secretariat is believed to have derived some of his greatness from just such a sport — an over-sized heart which is believed to have first appeared in his ancestor Eclipse. Another meaning of the word, although less prominent, is “a source of diversion” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). In other words, sport is an amusement. Morgan seems to circle back to that meaning to make a subtle comparison between horse racing and slavery: “Forge threw back his head and laughed...reminded once again of why he had brought his favorite slave instead of one of his younger brothers — to properly scout a land only dreamed of, to protect Forge's life at the expense of his own, and to amuse him.” (Location 286)

Slavery, horses and family legacy have an uncomfortable entanglement in the metaphors of this book.

Morgan employs numerous styles to drive her book forward. She circles and recircles the same ideas in different contexts. The story of the family's founder, Samuel Forge, is cast as mythology. Samuel Forge embarks on a quest for ideal farmland, he wanders the wilderness and overcomes seven hardships (Dread, Hunger, Want, Sleep, Toil, War and Discord). A boatman ferries him across a river. He finds redemption in fulfilling the trust of his dead father by making his way to Kentucky. (Location 1823) Each succeeding generation is tasked with rededicating itself to building and expanding the legacy they inherited.

Morgan returns to the Forge family history with a recitation of its patriarchal genealogy. The language she has chosen, however, is the argot of the breeder: “John Henry by Jacob Ellison Forge out of Emmylade Sturgiss, and Jacob by Moses Cooper Forge out of Florence Elizabeth Hardin....” (Location 217). That litany is repeated several times in the book. Only after his entire world has been shaken does Henry think of his history in the wrathful Old Testament language of “begat.” (Location 8943) That passage is juxtaposed with a medusa-like image.

The Forge genealogical incantation has totally erased the existence of its slaves. What became of the descendants of Ben (Dembe), that favorite slave who “amused” Samuel Forge? Much later, Morgan introduces a new family tree for a black man born in Cincinnati. This one has blank spaces, no patriarch. It includes an escaped slave named Scipio. Scipio's daughter is said to have participated in the underground railroad, helping Kentucky slaves to freedom. We hear no more about her. There is Scipio's great-great granddaughter named Claudia Marshall, married to a man only identified as “The Reverend.” Their daughter is Marie, and Marie's son Allmon is another main character of the book.

There are other examples of absences and erasures as well. Morgan reverts to an eerily understated voice to recount the names of black men and women who vanished in the past. The passage is heavy with irony. In Henry Forge's youth there were two prominent black servants, a cook named Maryleen and a farmhand named Fillip. Yet, Henry's own daughter wonders: “Has there ever been a black man in this kitchen before? In this house? Some memory was rattling around in her mind, but it wouldn't stand still.” (Location 3414) This absence of a genealogy weighs on Almon's mind. He complains to his mother: “You don't know who you are if you don't know where you come from.” (Location 4785) Just as the Forges believe their family name entitles them to power, Almon believes that the lack of a family history is yet another symbol of his impotence as a black man.

One of the most powerful passages on racism is viewed as Henry is schooled by his father John Henry. We have already seen him brutalize his son with a beating. Now, we watch him wielding his authority against a son who craves his father's approval. His convictions about white superiority and social class become part of a daily catechism. His pedagogic condescension mixed with erudite commentary on the Classics make these humiliating exercises all the more chilling.

Misogyny as well as racism is examined in this book. Henry's wife Judith escaped from her unhappiness through divorce. Henry lectures his daughter, “...[A] wise man harnesses his energies and expels them in a manner designed to improve his line....Your mother, for all her faults, was a damn fine piece of property.” (Location 2450) Much earlier, Judith had cautioned her daughter that only after marriage do you discover the truth: “Then you find out if you really are his prize, or just his prize heifer.” (Location 2136)

I read this book because it was mentioned in a list by The New York Times in connection with the Kentucky Derby. Is this really a book about horse racing? The short answer is No. It does contain numerous allusions and references to horse racing, and familiarity with these allusions is helpful. For example, it is believed that Eclipse's larger-than-average heart was passed on through the maternal line to Secretariat. The three races in the triple crown are the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes. Typically, foals are sold as yearlings. The largest auction of yearlings occurs at Keeneland where the horses don't even have names yet. They are identified by numbers affixed to their hips. Every thoroughbred is tattooed with a registration number on its lip.

Morgan never seduces the reader with the glamor of the Derby or the scents and feel of the backside. Ambition, not love, drives the owners and trainers. When Henry green-lights his trainer to do whatever it takes to prep his horse for the Derby after evidence of a leg problem, the trainer knows he is authorized to use powerful pain-killers that could mask signs of further injury.

This is the kind of book to be read multiple times. It invites the reader to look for those moments that transformed possibilities into an inevitability. It is not a fast read, and at 500+ pages, it demands an attentive mind. Moreover, there are long passages of exuberant description of the landscape. It's a serious book and well-written. For those reasons, I give it 5 stars.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read because: 2017 finalist for Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction

This story is…
....masterfully written.
....going to piss a lot of people off.
….a book that white people go nuts over, hailing it as literary genius as it deftly and sometimes graphically shows all the horrible things white privilege does to both white people and black. Feel sorry for us white folk, trying so hard to get woke with little to no success.
….not going to escape the criticisms heaped upon The Help and The Secret Life of Bees.
….not as horse-laden as one may have been lead to believe (thank goodness, I was dreading that part).
…intentionally pretentious.
….long, long-winded, and just super long. Have I mentioned how very long this is? It's long.
....a sweeping family saga in the American South but not gothic. Well, maybe a smidgen gothic.

As for the audiobook, I don’t think I liked having a white guy narrating this. In a strange turn of opinions, I would have preferred this to be read by a cast, not a single narrator. I suppose this narrator could have kept Henry Forge's parts but he mispronounces words and he doesn’t have the right accents so, maybe not.
I'm not saying the narrator is bad. He'd be great for other books. I just didn't like him for this one.

So this book has some problems. It's long (I may have mentioned that already), it's written with so much arrogance but, then, that seems to have been the point. It's trite but the cliches, themselves, are symbols. It's offensive but not unrealistic. Except for when it is unrealistic and then it's a different kind of offensive.

I actually enjoyed the story a great deal and I appreciated the over-the-top writing and the self-indulgent moments of author speaking to herself. I liked the overall framework and the tidy tying-up of loose ends.
But I didn't love any of it. It's ponderous, I wanted it to be done already, and the things I mentioned liking above were also awfully irritating.

This isn't a beach read. Well, I mean, of course you can read this on a beach if you want. But it takes some concentration so if you are at the beach with people who will demand your attention, probably read something lighter and easier to follow and save this one for when you have vast swaths of alone time on hand.

[Jeanette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some parts of this book were superb and nearly all of those most poetic/ lyrical were in regards to the animal, the thoroughbred horse. It follows a specific section of the country in Kentucky settled by the Forge family and the century plus that follows. Hard people who with Henry's dictation change the corn and other crop onus of the Forge land to that of raising/ developing genetic horse lines used in the sport of thoroughbred racing. The Sport of Kings. Obsessed to obtain and all sacrifices worthy to birth that particular throw back combination that will obtain another Secretariat descendant.

Parts of it are in dialect. Allmon's story became one of such misery that I found it difficult to return to it for the length of its sections. Henrietta's too -was of such core disbelief in her own value, IMHO, that it was not enjoyable, not for me, to get through most of her sections. The interludes (designated that exact title between chronological sections) broke the continuity and lost me an entire star for the rating. That particular style was apt for the emotive peaks and also for the aesthetics of plot point and melody (like a top note of a soprano's aria) but that break again, and again- it slashes my interest and knocks me out of the embedding characterizations and back into the overall "theme". And that overreach theme- gritty and harsh and dominated by despair born of no nurture and selfish borne regret.

The theme is never a joyous one in the humans. In the animals, in their striving plunge and spirit escaping the physical form- joyous all the way to glorious. Until it is capped and exhausted. And past its moment.

There's lots more. It's wide, very wide. But IMHO, that wideness in itself, it let's in so much peripheral human negativity and weakness, that it overlooks nearly all else in this fixation's "world". Too much.

[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This powerful, epic work of macro fiction has all the makings of a classic novel. I’ll be honest: at first I could barely muster the interest to start reading it. A 550-page book about horse racing? Nah, not for me. But The Sport of Kings is so much more than it appears to be: beneath the surface, it’s a sweeping examination of racism and classism in America.

At the center of this ambitious novel is the Forge family, one of Kentucky’s oldest and most powerful dynasties. As a young boy in the middle of the 20th century, Henry Forge is taught by his father that “man is the measure of all things” and that “real knowledge begins with knowing your place in the world.” Much to his father’s chagrin, Henry is intent on altering his family’s legacy. He has greater ambitions than growing corn; instead, he becomes obsessed with breeding the next Secretariat, and years later he enlists his daughter, Henrietta, to help.

Henry and Henrietta are each given entire sections of the book—and they’re fascinating characters. But there’s another key person at the heart of their story: Allmon Shaughnessy, the biracial groom Henrietta hires (without consulting her father) to help them with their horses. While the Forges have a deep history of wealth and racism, Allmon carries with him the wounds of being a poor black man in a country that seems hellbent on tearing him down. Inevitably, they converge in a myriad of complex ways that build to a tragic denouement.

This isn’t a quick, easy read. It’s dense and it’s demanding and it requires a significant investment—and yet it’s ceaselessly compelling. Morgan is smarter than most of us—and to the delight of a reader like myself who enjoys being challenged intellectually and emotionally, she isn’t afraid to show it. She quotes Darwin and Protagoras. She doesn’t give us easy answers or tidy resolutions.

Although it takes place in modern times, we learn about the Forge’s history as slaveowners and the tragic story of Allmon’s great-great-great-grandfather, an escaped slave. And through all of this is a sense that the characters have fixed destinies—a fatalism from which they are each desperate to liberate themselves. Horse racing is about lineage, and so, too, is the story beneath the surface in The Sport of Kings. But people aren’t animals, and their lineage is more than just biology and genetics; it’s history and circumstance, both familial and sociological.

[Mike W · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the novel’s opening scene, a young Henry Forge, guilty of killing a neighbor’s bull, breathlessly sprints through a cornfield in an attempt to hide from his father and avoid the coming reckoning. I couldn’t help but think of Genesis and Adam, the first to try the same for having committed the original sin. In some sense, the scene is a microcosm of the novel; the book portending a reckoning for America’s original sin of slavery.

Henry Forge has a name. His father, the latest in a long line of austere, corn farming, Forges drives this principle into Henry daily. That Forge name is everything, representing generations of men who feel they have earned the land upon which they till, the servants they have owned or employed, the respect of their peers, and their massive wealth. When a teen-aged Henry tells his father that he plans to to convert the family farm into one for the breeding of thoroughbreds his father becomes nearly apoplectic. The family name is everything, and horse breeding is beneath them. Henry sticks to his plan, and when the farm is his, he follows his dream.

Allmon Shaughnessy has a name as well, but it only goes back one generation: his white father who left his black mother alone and in the ghetto in Cincinnati. She works hard, but her employer doesn’t give her health benefits, and when medical problems arise, unable to afford the treatments she needs, she and Allmon must descend the housing ladder until they find themselves in the worst of neighborhoods where drugs and violence reign. Allmon does know his grandfather, from whom his mother is somewhat estranged and he vaguely knows the name of a distant relative, Scipio, from the days of slavery, whose name but not his story has been passed down and thus has largely lost its significance as far as Allmon is concerned.

The paths of these two men, Henry and Allmon, cross when Henry’s only child, Henrietta Forge hires Allmon to work with their thoroughbreds. Henrietta is one who has learned to take what she wants, and Allmon finds himself in her crosshairs. When Henry learns of their relationship, the racism inculcated in him by his long line of hate filled forefathers comes to the fore and since he cannot solve the problem with the violence that they once used, he determines to end their tryst with the ultimate weapon in the family arsenal: money. Allmon strikes a deal with Mr Forge that he believes will free him from the cage of his history but soon learns there is much more to that deal than either of them realized.

If history and legacy are the vehicles to success in America, then thoroughbred horse racing may be their perfect symbol. The Forge’s have an obsession with bloodlines, thus the genetics involved in their equine investments is tailor made; they know who begat whom in the racing world as well as any biblical scholar knows the same in the Torah. These lines determine ultimate success, and any creature born outside of them is an also ran at best. Through these creatures, C.E. Morgan holds a mirror to American society and seems to ask just how much things have functionally changed since its founding.

All that being said, there are two things you should know. First, the above summary is about as simple a description of the novel that I can muster and second, there is absolutely nothing simple about this novel. Like its fictional filly Hellsmouth, it's a massive, muscular intelligent beast. This is a complex story with so many symbols and interwoven plot points that one reading likely cannot do it justice. I had several moments during this reading experience where I was in awe of Morgan’s ability to tie massive amounts of information together, reminiscent of Melville. She is a talent of whom I had not heard but from whom I now have the highest of expectations.

Morgan has created a world with immensely interesting characters, some likable, some despotic, but all beautifully crafted. Perhaps none is more interesting though than Reuben Bedford Walker III a 5’ 2” openly gay, black jockey who only appears in the final quarter of the novel but manages to steal the show. His dialog is a masterpiece on its own and he would be at home on the deck of the Pequod, on the stage at the Globe and of course on the track. Besides being incredibly entertaining, he also proves important to the story, delivering unforgettable history lessons.

The Sport of Kings demonstrates Morgan's tremendous range. Able to discuss a stunning number of topics and ideas, she seems comfortable and competent with them all, from complex human emotions to genetic science she proves an able facilitator of the ideas important to her stories.

So, are we bound by our past; our biology, our history? Is personal freedom ultimately an illusion? Or has America progressed enough that these things no longer have the impact on our destiny that they once did? The Sport of Kings takes on these questions and so many more. It is rarely a comfortable read, there is rape, incest, lynching and no shortage of other cruelties, but in spite of all that it is a worthwhile read for its honest look at an America still divided in so many important ways.

Note: I received a free ARC via NetGalley for the purpose of review.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are white, and male, the Sport of Kings makes for uncomfortable reading at times. C.E Morgan has written a novel in which women and black people are subject to the worst humiliations and injustices.
Of men: ”The truth is that men aren't interested in your happiness; they'll make you think that's the case, they'll treat you really great for a while and make all sorts of promises and give you all their attention, but they reach a point where they can't pretend anymore. They're just selfish animals, and in the end, animals can't hide their nature. ” (117)

The question is whether this sustained racial and sexual polemic strays into the realms of stereotype.
I don’t think it does, and there’s much to like and to admire in Sport of Kings.
C.E. Morgan is an ambitious writer. Her language is rich; she describes the natural world (Darwin a significant influence one suspects) beautifully, and her knowledge of and use of obscure/unusual words is impressive. The book centres on the “Bluegrass” region of Kentucky - the meadow-land of Eastern America.
Other reviewers have said that the thought of reading over five hundred pages of writing on equine matters was not an enticing prospect. That was my advance view too, judging the title and the book cover. But Sport of Kings is only about horses and bloodstock breeding in a passing, and secondary, way. Sport of Kings does examine breeding, does ask questions about natural selection, of random selection, both of animals, and people. Sometimes the conclusions and outcomes are warped and deeply disappointing. Horse breeding as an industry is not spared the writers reproach.

Sport of Kings follows two primary characters; Allmon Shaughnessey and Henrietta Forge. Both characters are deeply flawed, both are inhibited by their childhoods and upbringing, and both, in different ways, convey the inevitability that the passage through life is harsh. As I read the book I never anticipated happy endings.
C.E. Morgan does undertake a number of digressions from the storyline. These are musings about nature, the immutability of things; the transitory nature of the human condition. Is this merely an author’s indulgence? As a contrast to the developing narrative, the sweeping, reflective literary device can be frustrating; but I found C.E. Morgan’s prose lyrical and evocative during these “Interludes” (her description). The writing style is obviously designed to be in marked contrast to the deliberately brutish descriptive terms reserved for people’s actions, and emotions.
C.E. Morgan’s writing is full of clever and apposite one liners:
A mother to her daughter “”men like naïve girls, and there’s a reason for that” (102). (a smart, worldly woman won’t put up with men’s vanities and weakness).
One man to another: “Hate you? I don't even remember your name” (367)
Sport of Kings juxtaposes the freshness and freedom of the natural world with the perennial bitterness of men. Hurt and betrayal engendered over many years, through generations, does not dissipate quickly, if at all.
Sport of Kings has been a nominee for a number of literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2017. I would like it to win the Baileys prize for Women’s literature, while feeling that it deserves to be recognised on a larger, wider, platform.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this very much. Fascinating characters, even though they're often horrendous.

[Chris Blocker · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive epic, The Sport of Kings runs strong. Despite focusing on horse racing and farming of the last century, Morgan's second novel is extremely relevant for today's tumultuous American landscape. With gorgeous prose, realistic characters, and a story that never stays stagnant for long, Morgan has crafted a winning novel, entertaining and intelligent.

I'm not one for horse racing. I don't even like horses—I've always found them to be frighteningly alien in appearance. But when this novel showed up on an Anticipated Future Release List of some variety, the description somehow enticed me—I had been curious about the author anyway—and I gave it a try. Initially, I admired the strong writing, but I wasn't pulled into the story. The Sport of Kings is in many ways an epic, and it certainly takes some time for the story to develop.

Some readers will not care for the breadth of Morgan's novel. As evidenced by The Sport of Kings, Morgan is perhaps wordy at times. She has a great grasp of the English language and her descriptions will tire some readers. Further, she is an intelligent author, but that can also get in the way at times. Word choice can grow repetitive. “Dais,” for instance, is used any time a character speaks from a pulpit or platform. Who uses this word? Is this prominent in Kentucky? The frequent repetitiveness stopped me every time.

But these are minor quibbles. The fact is, The Sport of Kings is a phenomenal and sweeping family saga. It is gutsy and provoking in a way that reminds me of a serious Man Booker contender. I will not be the least surprised if The Sport of Kings does not make this year's long list (to be announced July 27). Remember, if it makes the list, you heard it from me first.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I delayed reading this book for the longest time primarily because of the horse racing. This book isn't about horse racing of course but it does contain a lot (read too much) about horses and horse racing. It's about rage and 'spoiled inbred racist motherfuckers'. I admired so much about this book and its epic sprawling storytelling. Morgan's ability to examine racism, ambition, privilege, the legacies of slavery, the role and treatment of women and the mythology of the South while rendering a page-turning story and carefully drawn characters is nothing short of breathtaking. I did, however, find the Darwinian evolution and genetics ideas a little laboured. The writing here is inspired.