Horse

Horse by Geraldine Brooks. A wonderful book! The historical part is so good, and apparently as factually true as she could make it, with a great deal of research. A good book for our times, when we are arguing about how to teach the history of this country. It gives the lie to the persistent “happy slave” narrative (that some are proposing even now!)–no one can doubt, after reading this book, that even a slave with a “good” master is still a slave! And decidedly NOT happy. I did have a quarrel with the ending. Without being too much of a spoiler, although what happens could have happened, of course, I found it was so overwhelming, and raised so many difficult issues so late in the book that the book was unwilling to deal with, that it overshadowed the remarkably effective and nuanced story that preceded it.

The same thing happens in the wonderful book, Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson. An in-depth portrayal of a small logging town on the California coast that allows us to live inside these characters and understand their history and their desires, but the ending seems forced and unnecessary. Almost as if these characters had so much bad luck in their lives, there couldn’t possibly be the hint of a happy ending. In both these books, I felt authorial intrusion, the author forced the ending rather than the ending the book wanted.