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

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

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

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

Ballsy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



( )

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

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

The title will suggest that the novel is about horse racing. Not really. Oh, there’s plenty of story, and a good deal of information, about the so-called “sport of Kings” in it. And if you’re not already appalled at the way animals are treated by owners, trainers and handlers, you will be if you read this. Further, you’ll probably summon up a bit of sympathy for the grooms and jockeys that you may not have known they had coming. But what this book is really about is breeding --- genetics, and Class, and sex, and every other connotation of that word. And it’s about race.

The Forge family is Kentucky nobility. Forebears traveled into the Virginia wilderness before it became Kentucky, and made themselves prosperous planters. For generations, acres of corn and tobacco filled the Forge barns and purses, as well as the state's Bourbon barrels and pipes. Until one rebellious scion decided he wanted to raise thoroughbred horses despite his father’s strong objection that it was a disreputable endeavor unworthy of his lineage. He would by god raise horses, notwithstanding. And so he did. He also raised a daughter in his own image...a woman who knew horses, knew breeding, and knew---in a Biblical sense---many many men. One of those men came from another long line---a long black line that could trace its existence on this continent back to that same wilderness trek. And here is where it becomes impossible to talk about the twists and turns of the modern and the historical stories intertwined in the novel without giving away elements that deserve to be discovered by the reader.
If you take Absalom, Absalom, shift a few things around but keep the core elements (obsession, possession, miscegenation both intentional and accidental, incest), extend the action into the current century, move it all to Kentucky and pretend it's about breeding horses, you’ll have a vague idea of the scope of The Sport of Kings.
C. E. Morgan has done a credible job of telling a mythic, Southern Gothic tale worthy of the master; she even has a talent for what one Faulkner critic called "hallucinated language". Neither she nor her editors, however, knew quite when to holler “Whoa!”, and there were spots when I really wanted to shake the book and let the excess fall out. An engrossing read, nonetheless, and one I’d recommend, if you’re up for this sort of thing. Do not expect to root for anyone (except maybe a horse), and do not look for a redemptive denouement. ( )