I had high hopes for this book, and I was disappointed. I’ll be honest, when I read this, I would have guessed this was written by a lady who’d never touched a horse in her life. Well, I was mistaken, because I looked up Geraldine Brooks and learned that she started riding in her fifties and owns a horse. So then why, I ask, does she write the same trope in every young-adult horse novel I’ve ever read (and I’ve read quite a few, for I did love the trope when I was 10)? Perhaps I’m just jealous because I’ve never had a telepathic connection with a horse, but it didn’t feel at all real to me. Especially the ridiculous number of times Jarret slept in Lexington’s stall, with Lexington. That just strikes me as a very bad idea and I hope we all agree. Throughout the entire book, he was making poor decisions based on his unhealthy obsession with the horse, from deciding to run away and then recanting on that decision, to stealing away in the night to save a blind horse, to leaving his family to make regular visits to the horse. Clearly, this is a very special horse, but it is, after all, just a horse.
While we’re on the “not real,” topic, none of the modern-day characters felt real either. Jess and Theo are flat, and I didn’t think they had any chemistry. They share a couple of afternoons and then hop in the shower together, all while Theo compares Jess to his mother and sighs about her whiteness. Theo was constantly on the verge of ending things because she’s white, and therefore does not and could never understand him, would forever be a tiring burden and embarrassing in front of his mother and friends.
Worst of all was Martha Jackson and her fellow Pollock characters. They showed up randomly, halfway through the novel, and then disappeared again. They didn’t add anything to the plot. They were just there to place another one of the paintings in an interesting forever home.
Oh, I had forgotten the actual worst part, where Brooks writes Thomas Scott into an implicit homosexual affair. I wonder what Thomas Scott would have to say about that.
My last critique is that it was not well written. There were too many similes comparing people to horses and uninteresting introspection. All to say, I still give it three stars, because, after all, it was about horses.