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PAINTED HORSES

by Malcolm Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2014

It’s a sight better than The Bridges of Madison County, but it’s a kindred project: Boy meets girl under open sky, boy...

A mid-1950s oater that wants to come over all cowboy and sensitive at the same time.

Catherine Lemay, the heroine of Brooks’ debut, is a young archaeologist who’s seen the aftermath of war poking around in the rubble of London. John H—she thinks it could stand for “horses,” but “hell raiser” is a reasonable candidate—rides the Western fence line, following the mustangs. He’s known war up close, a member of the last American horse cavalry unit to see combat, fighting the Germans in Italy. It stands to reason that, Montana being a small state and all, they’ll meet and become intertwined like two wind-blasted strands of barbed wire. When Mr. H funs, he funs, but when he and Catherine get serious, well….There’s plenty to be serious about apart from sad reflections on the war, for a dam is coming to the coulee in which the mustangs run, and both Catherine and John H have to make a stand: Do they serve progress, or do they fight for what’s real about the West? Brooks does a good job of plotting, following parallel stories that speak to that large question through characters who are more than just symbols—though they’re that, too. There’s some fine writing here, especially when it comes to horses and the material culture that surrounds them, and when it comes to Western landscapes, too, for Brooks knows that in good Western writing, the land is always a character. There’s also some overwriting, along the lines of “[s]he wanted Audrey Williams to keep talking, wanted to know her story too, the fragments and pieces and the buried mysteries, wanted the whole vicarious treasure of it.” A little of that goes a long way, especially when Brooks places himself inside Catherine’s head—and, from time to time, elsewhere in her body.

Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2164-6

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Malcolm Brooks

WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “ You’ll get only one shot at this ,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “ Don’t botch it .” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “ That form is a deal breaker ,” he tells himself. “ It’s life and death .” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018

The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...

An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.

Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowi erer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas . She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

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by Heather Morris

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, painted horses.

Malcolm Brooks’s debut novel, PAINTED HORSES, is about horses. “Solid coats, bay and blood bay and chestnut and the stud horse himself, a dun the color of alfalfa honey with a black line the length of his spine. Not a piebald or roan among them.” There are the painted horses as well, part of Crow and Cheyenne tradition, and some colored by the hands of John H [the H may stand for horses, or it may not], a runaway, and perhaps a deserter, of the last Cavalry regiment in WWII. His sketches drawn in the dusty earth with a twig capture the running horses, and a trademark yellow handprint appears on the sides of horses and a converted Dodge army ambulance.

Catherine Lemay, a piano student, has the extraordinary good luck to be in London in the 1950s, ostensibly using her Fulbright to continue her education in music, when archaeologists are unearthing Londinium. Her life is changed as she visits the dig and touches the stones and artifacts buried beneath London’s streets; she feels the sharp sense that she is in the Roman world, part of history. Her passion is moderated by one of the professors at the site who tells her, “In archaeology, it’s helpful to remember it’s not all buried treasure and hieroglyphs. We’re also unearthing a bit of ourselves.” This advice is more prophetic than we could guess.

"PAINTED HORSES is a wonderfully told story, and each rich detail shows a fascinating piece of the American West."

Catherine changes her life plans and studies archaeology. She is commissioned by the Smithsonian to go to Montana to explore a canyon to make sure nothing of historical or cultural value will be lost when a major hydroelectric dam, 500 feet tall, is built at the mouth. The flooding is opposed by some Crow Indians; in fact, the Crows hold it to be sacred ground, but industrial and financial rewards are too great to hold back the Harris Power and Light Company.

Initially, Catherine faces the huge canyon and the task of exploring it alone; Jack Allen, a mustanger, and Miriam, a young Crow woman who taught herself to read before she started grade school, become involved in the task of looking for something that is so vague it is just something . The three camp in the canyon for several nights, and they make discoveries about each other and the stereotypes of 70 years ago. Montana of the 1950s seems even more distant when we look through the prism of our technology-driven age.

John H’s story is told in tandem with Catherine’s. Their first meeting is on Main Street in Agency, Montana, as she almost bumps into his horse. It was “a demon horse, garish and primeval with symbols in yellow and red, rings around one eye and bands up its legs and the splayed print of a human hand plastered on a flank.” She is terrified.

John H remains anonymous for some time, but Catherine notices the coincidences of their meetings. He rescues her from a long, treacherous journey back to town when she has a flat tire her first day in the canyon. He has lived in the canyon and knows how to survive; he is aware that the language used in writing on trees was Basque. He tells her about quaking aspens, trees that turn gold in October, and that all the trees along the ridges of the canyon are one tree. “One giant life. Aspens in a grove sprout off the root rather than the seed. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all connected underground.” He can tame horses no one else could even approach. And he shows her that the beauty of a place may be in its very emptiness.

The changes for Catherine and John H come about slowly, all of their movements set against the rocky, rugged terrain of the canyon. Nature is unforgiving but just. The man-made forces also push them to their limits, and they understand just how delicately tradition aligns with progress. PAINTED HORSES is a wonderfully told story, and each rich detail shows a fascinating piece of the American West.

Reviewed by Jane Krebs on August 8, 2014

Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks

Publication Date: June 9, 2015
Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN-10: 0802123813
ISBN-13: 9780802123817

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Painted Horses

Written by Malcolm Brooks Review by Jo Ann Butler

In the mid-1950s, Catherine Lemay goes to London to study music. Instead, she falls in love with archeology. Battered by German bombs only a decade before, the city’s Roman ruins enchant Catherine, and she helps salvage a unique temple which blocks post-war rebuilding. The next year, Catherine applies to the Smithsonian Institute for a summer position. To her surprise, the graduate student is hired, in large part because of her experience on a site which interfered with a developer’s plans.

Catherine is assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers in Montana. Soon the Corps will start work on a dam which, when complete, will drown a canyon. It is Catherine’s job to ensure that no significant archeological remains will be lost. However, the area is far too vast for a lone archeologist to cover. Catherine realizes that the Corps wants the inexperienced young woman to fail. Then she hears of a fabulous panel of Pleistocene artwork, unlike anything seen in the New World. Catherine needs to locate it quickly – and also to prove herself. She seeks help from the mysterious John H, a U.S. Army deserter living in the canyon and Miriam, a young Crow woman whose tribal lands will soon be flooded.

I loved Painted Horses , the marvelous debut historical novel by Malcolm Brooks. He’s a hell of a story teller, and offers readers an elegant love story, a haunting memoir of war, and an epic battle between preservation and development. Above all, this book will leave its mark on you, just as John H slaps yellow handprints on his mounts and some prehistoric artist etched horses on a rocky Montana canvas.

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Painted Horses : Book summary and reviews of Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks

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Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

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Published Aug 2014 336 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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Book summary.

In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates that time and untamed landscape, in a tale of the modern and the ancient, of love and fate, and of heritage threatened by progress. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her - a canyon - as deep as the devil's own appetites." Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar - the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there's John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army's last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman's vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent.

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BookBrowse Review Malcolm Brooks' descriptions of the West are intensely beautiful, but the characters are not detailed enough in their characterizations to be fully credible, and the resolution of the novel is random and jarring. Although, Brooks' first novel Painted Horses teems with the brutal beauty and magnificence of the West, there is very little beyond its series of descriptive set pieces to recommend it. The exposition of the novel takes chapters to explain, which in and of itself is not negative, but the followup must deserve the elaborate introduction. This novel fails as soon as it delves into the substance of its characters or attempts to move the plot. Catherine Lemay heads west to excavate a canyon, a site for a proposed dam. If nothing anthropologically significant is found, the canyon will be flooded to create a dam that will provide the nearby valley with much needed electricity. Catherine's efforts are stymied from the beginning by her lack of understanding of the terrain or history of the area. This introduction is interesting, but over the course of the novel, she fails to feel credible as a real woman. She reads mainly as a male version of what a woman should be. The result is an out of focus character whose exploits are either unbelievable in their overly male characterization, or insulting. In the rare moments that Brooks attempts to correct for his male characterization of his main female character, he resorts to discussing her menstrual cycles. In further insult, to Catherine, and the female reader, this Oxford-educated woman's only recourse to escape one tough scrape is to blame her "period." John H, on the other hand, is a vivid character with deep interest. The scenes from his childhood are some of the best of the novel. Sadly, things fall apart when he meets Catherine. Her lack of focus seeps into their relationship - titled an "epic love" by the marketing materials - and the relationship is unconvincing on every level. There is nothing "epic" here, except the sex scenes. I was totally unconvinced that they had any real connection at all. The nail is further hammered in by the choice to undercut the emotion of John and Catherine's meeting with a flash to John's past describing another woman. The relationship is too fast and too unfounded to be believable. The final chapters of the novel falter because they are overly orchestrated. Left with forcing his unrealized lovers to do something before the conclusion, Brooks forces them into an odd series of choices that feel rushed and, again, unfounded. The close reads like a different novel than the early chapters. Because of this, the end of the book is just bizarre. Other Reviews "Starred Review. Brooks's debut captures the grandeur of the American West. " - Publishers Weekly "Starred Review. Brooks delivers an authentic story, examining in gripping, page-turning prose what it means to live in the West... An outstanding debut novel that will linger in the reader's mind." - Library Journal "The book loses some credibility as it develops more contemporary plot elements, but its vividly drawn atmosphere and strong characters will keep the reader engaged." - Booklist "Reminiscent of the fiery, lyrical and animated spirit of Cormac McCarthy's Borderlands trilogy, and the wisdom and elegance of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose , Painted Horses is its own work, a big, old-fashioned and important novel." - Rick Bass, author of All the Land to Hold Us "From its filmic geographical canvases and epochs to its mesmerizing close-ups of men, women and horses whose weaknesses, wounds, and powers are in plain paradoxical view, Malcolm Brooks' novel-making is always skilled and often breath-taking." - David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why " Painted Horses is a wonderful novel full of horses, archeology, the new West, and two fascinating women. Malcolm Brooks should be lauded for this amazing debut. Very fine." - Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog "[Brooks] evokes a time and a place tinged by an autumnal sun, the brass thunderclap of things ending and beginning again. Painted Horses will carry you away." - Doug Stanton, author of the New York Times bestseller Horse Soldiers "In Painted Horses , Malcolm Brooks tells a spectacular story. An archeological adventuress searches for signs of a pre-conquest culture in the rugged depths of a Montana canyon while trying to fend off construction of a hydroelectric dam. . . Real and painted horses, danger and defeat, and an enduring love affair. Kept me up through a few nights." - William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Willow Field " Painted Horses is a gorgeous, luminous song of a novel." - Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall

Author Information

Malcolm brooks.

Malcolm Brooks was raised in the rural foothills of the California Sierras, and grew up around Gold Rush and Native American artifacts. A carpenter by trade, he has lived in Montana for most of two decades. His writing has appeared in Gray's Sporting Journal, Outside, Sports Afield, and Montana Quarterly, among others.

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‘Painted Horses’ by Malcolm Brooks

There is an exchange between two characters in Malcolm Brooks’s extraordinary debut novel, “Painted Horses,” that epitomizes the surprising and satisfying depth of the characters. In the mid-50s, Catherine Lemay, a neophyte archaeologist, arrives in rural Montana to determine whether a remote canyon might have any cultural or historical significance that may prevent it becoming a future dam site. Knowing she needs a guide and ally, Catherine hires a young Crow woman named Miriam. On their first day in the canyon, Catherine awkwardly apologizes for her privileged background.

“[M]y parents have a notion that Englishness is somehow sacred . . . and buy a lot of grotesque furniture and Wedgwood pottery . . .

“Miriam shook her head. ‘Catherine, you’re going to have to get something straight. I never lived in a teepee. I can barely stand to eat venison . . . I don’t know what Wedgwood pottery is, but I’m sure I’d love to own some.’ ”

Admittedly, my first glimpse of the principal characters — archaeologist Catherine; John H, the mysterious horseman-artist; the menacing and malevolent mustang hunter, Jack Allen; and Max Caldwell, the gas station owner with the heart of gold — had me on the brink of an epic bout of eye-rolling.

Brooks, however, defies low expectations by supplying multiple layers of their emotional and psychological evolution. Brooks has fashioned compelling and sympathetic protagonists in Catherine, John H and Miriam, but he doesn’t make the mistake of simply presenting them to the reader whole cloth. They’re interesting because of the roads they travel to the present; Brooks is nothing if not ambitious in exploring those roads.

John H — orphan, rail rider, cowboy, World War II veteran, Paris artist, canyon hermit — in particular, has a backstory that is both intimate and sweeping in a way that may remind readers of Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient.” True, it’s necessary to suspend disbelief as the young Montana horseman and shepherd makes his way from the battlefields of Italy to the salons of Paris and back to Montana without raising the eyebrows of a single border patrol officer, but because Brooks is so careful in constructing multidimensional characters, he manages to pull it off. “Painted Horses” is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist, where a scarcely trained archaeologist can find herself at the center of one of the potentially most significant finds in North America, where some of the most poignant moments take place at a town dance or trying to get service at a local café where Indians are not welcome, or where Catherine and John H finally come together through their shared obsession with the painted horses of the title.

When the story opens, Catherine’s nascent career as an archaeologist has taken an enormous leap forward because of her lucky inclusion in a post World War II dig that uncovers a Roman temple. She is barely across the state line when she first encounters John H. Their meetings grow with frequency and intensity as their mutual attraction and shared sense of mission intensify. Though their reasons differ slightly, both Catherine and John H are determined to derail the massive dam project, even though they know from the outset that the forces against them are overwhelming. While the first half of the book is heaving with the characters’ backstory, the story picks up speed and becomes a race against those determined to lay waste to the land’s past in order to build what they consider the glorious future.

Painted horses have different meanings for nearly every main character in the book. For John H, they harken back to the great Native-American horsemen of the plains. For Jack Allen, they represent a challenge and threat to his sense of order, and for Catherine, they are an important link to prehistory. One of the book’s great and unexpected moments occurs when John H’s lover in Paris, Elixabete, takes him to the French countryside. They arrive at the ruins of a chateau where they are guided into a cave and shown prehistoric paintings of wild horses . . . paintings that have an uncanny resemblance to John H’s own work. It’s a wonderful moment of illumination that is repeated in the novel when Catherine and Miriam make their own unexpected discovery.

The book’s greatest strength and success is that the characters don’t act simply to service the plot. They act like people. Their flaws as much as anything else push the story toward a sadly inevitable conclusion. When Miriam unwittingly betrays her friends, it’s because she’s simply a woman attracted to the wrong kind of man. When the long-awaited showdown between John H and Jack Allen occurs, it’s not ‘High Noon’ or any other overly romanticized Western scene. There is a touch of heroism about the protagonists, but they’re not superheroes endowed with powers that will save the last vestiges of the wild and natural West. In the end, it’s enough they could briefly experience it.

Kent Black is an editor and writer who lives in New Mexico.

Book Review: Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks

Also, I hope you like horses, because there are a lot of horses.

You’ve probably already read or seen this paint-by-numbers storyline: the naïve outsider sent by authorities to the frontier to deal with stubborn natives. Once acclimated, usually with an intimate tryst with one of the locals, they see things as they really are and face a sticky moral dilemma: tradition versus progress. Examples include Dances With Wolves , Avatar , etc. It’s not quite Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but in this novel the fairly “classic” tale is set in an engrossing world so rich with detail that it functions as a character on its own.

On behalf of the Smithsonian and the Army Corps of Engineers, River Basin Surveys has picked Catherine Lemay, a young archaeologist, to scout the land and look for signs of Crow Indian habitation before a hydroelectric dam can be built. In a pushy letter to the wide-eyed and overeducated Catherine, the utility head insists that the land is as unpopulated as it is inhospitable. “By modern reckoning the canyon is a wasteland and I intend to drown it, for the benefit of everyone including the Crow, whose schools and services and general opportunities to advance only stand to gain.”

She meets horse-master John H (no last name, no initial or explanation). He is the sensitive cowboy type, with a significant backstory so generous that it makes her music student-turned-archaeology background feel somewhat piddling. That might be because of the interesting choice the author has made in telling this story. The first half of the book focuses on the paths that led them to teaming up. Her fish-out-of-water storyline is mostly set in the present with anecdotal flashbacks, a comedy-of-manners until she gets set straight. John H’s arc is mostly set in the past, reaching from his Baltimore childhood to a teenage years mastering horses and on to World War II and his time as an artist living in Paris. He is roughhewn, wind-chapped, suffering without complaint while waxing rhapsodic on horse lore and Basque heritage. She is putty in his hands.

It’s a Western whose romance and abstraction-free writing style has more in common with the works of Larry McMurtry or Annie Proulx than the overly dense allusions and verbiage of Cormac McCarthy. Brooks doesn’t dwell on the inner emotional life of these characters; preciousness like that wouldn’t be in line with the type of people who inhabit this corner of the hardscrabble West. But that doesn’t mean the author doesn’t indulge in a bit of the cowboy fetishizing that McCarthy built his career on:

John H scans the stock of stiff new display saddles with their tall pommels and almond-colored fenders. Minor variations in cantle design and horn shape and tooling. A single black parade saddle, heavily bedizened with latigo and silver pendants. John H ignores this and walks over to a simple working outfit with a deep seat and a double-cinch, a small steel horn perched atop the pommel like the arching neck of a swan. He runs his fingers across a star stamped into the leather of the seat.

The pearl-clutching Catherine is an agent without agency until her Marlboro Man shows her what she should really be fighting for. Will she follow her ambition and fulfill her professional duty OR respect her findings and fight the powers that be? You might be able to guess the ending but that doesn’t mean this one is worth skipping. Sturdy books with “timeless” storylines feel rare, so I hope Brooks’s novel finds the audience that it so clearly deserves.

Publisher: Grove Press

Pub date: August 2014

Reviewed by Andrew Wetzel

New Voices: "The Mothers" by Amy Scharmann

The st. lawrence book award - deadline august 31.

clock This article was published more than 9 years ago

‘Painted Horses,’ by Malcolm Brooks

In Malcolm Brooks's first novel, it is 1956 or thereabouts. Elvis Presley is "this new singer," and " Blackboard Jungle " is playing at the movie theater in Billings, Mont. But when Catherine Lemay asks the teenage Miriam, "Is rock and roll here yet?" Miriam replies, "Um, maybe? I know I've heard of it." The rest of the country might be surging ahead on a wave of post-war prosperity, but Montana still feels like the rugged land of Zane Grey novels, an Old West inhabited by horsemen, wild mustangs and lonely shepherds.

Change is in the offing. South of Billings, a massive hydroelectric dam project will bring jobs, new services and modernity, but 50 miles of canyon will disappear when water rises behind the dam. Since part of the canyon lies on Crow Indian land, River Basin Surveys, under the auspices of the Smithsonian, has sent Catherine, an archaeologist, to look for any prehistoric sites that might be important enough to stop or postpone construction.

Harris Power and Light, the contractor for the dam project, has offered to furnish ground support for her survey, which strikes Catherine as a conflict of interest. Indeed, HP&L had pulled the strings to ensure that a 23-year-old female — a graduate student with scant experience and little knowledge of New World prehistory — was hired for this work in the first place. Soon enough, she realizes that she isn’t supposed to find anything.

Early on, she meets a man whose name is John H — people say the H might stand for “horse.” He and Catherine seem destined to come together, but Brooks is in no hurry to take his readers there. Events in the canyon play out fitfully, woven into a slow unfolding of John H’s history: Brought up in Maryland in the world of thoroughbred racehorses, he learned at a young age that “horses seem to regard him as natural kin.” He hops a freight west when he’s barely 14 years old; winds up in Montana, sheltered by a Basque sheepherder; takes up mustang-hunting; spends the war years in the U.S. Army cavalry — not the mechanized cavalry but a little-known unit hunting Nazis on horseback. Now in Montana he’s holed up in a stone hut that was a hideout for livestock thieves “back in the wild old days.” To make his living, he breaks horses for a family of sheepherders. On his own time, he hunts a certain young mustang stallion and paints horses in a way that unconsciously echoes ancient European cave paintings.

“Are you a cowboy?” Catherine asks him, and though he answers “nope” in a Gary Cooper drawl, he is, in fact, the iconic loner of classic Western novels.

Such novels are often elegiac, tinged with nostalgia, and there is both great beauty and muted sorrow in Brooks’s descriptions of the wild Montana landscape and John H’s vanishing way of life. “The walls angled pink and sheer on either side, the sky thin as a crack overhead. The gorge snaked and sidled like the forces of wind and water that carved it, twisting this way and that, its sandy floor littered with rocks calved loose and toppled from above.”

The novel is less assured, less persuasive, when it turns toward its heroine. Catherine is dauntless and a proto-feminist, if only by virtue of her work in a male-dominated field. Yet, as if to remind us of her femaleness, she frequently peers at her reflection and assesses her appearance — holds out her arms “like wings” as she examines her naked body in a shard of mirror. She worries about her jagged fingernails, her sunburned skin, her hair and how many sanitary napkins she will need when she heads out camping. She’s a veteran of the muck and mud of a London dig, but in Montana she hesitates to fill her canteen from a clear mountain spring.

Despite these odd missteps, " Painted Horses " vividly evokes an earlier time, a place and a way of being that is at the cusp of great change. In his gift for the language of horses and the culture of horsemen, Brooks will inevitably recall Cormac McCarthy . And like Ivan Doig in " Bucking the Sun ," he mines one of the darker veins in the mythology of the American West, the seam where "greatness gets built on destruction."

Gloss is the author of several novels, including “The Hearts of Horses.” Her novel “Falling From Horses” will be published in October.

PAINTED HORSES

By Malcolm Brooks

Grove. 370 pp. $26

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My Personal Canon

Review: Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks

Catherine Lemay grows up as the only child of well-to-do parents who live in the outskirts of New York City. Her parents want her to study piano, so like a good daughter she gets accepted into Julliard and heads off to London on a Fulbright Scholarship. But while she is in London exploring the city, she stumbles upon an ancient Roman archaeological dig. One thing leads to another and Catherine gives up the piano and changes her studies to archaeology.

During a summer in the 1950’s, Catherine is hired by Harris Light and Power to look for Native American artifacts in a canyon in Montana. The power company is obligated to conduct a survey of the canyon before they flood it for their power damn. It is evident that the executives at this company chose Catherine because she is not only young, but also a woman who could not possibly be capable of finding anything in their canyon. The discovery of artifacts of any significance would mean delays for the company’s project and they will not let anything stand in the way of what they view as progress.

We are also treated to the story of John H. who is a horse whisperer of sorts an well as an artist and lives in the canyon that Catherine will survey. The author cleverly gives him a common first name and only a letter for a last name. He is orphaned at any early age and makes his way out west by jumping on trains. He has no family, no ties in the world and answers to no one. The best parts of the book involve the backstory of John H. and the development of his character as an interesting man who rides horses and paints them as well.

It is obvious from the beginning of the novel that Catherine and John H. are destined to cross paths. I was disappointed that the inevitable interaction between them does not take place until the last quarter of the book. Before their encounter, the reader is given intricate descriptions of American west scenery, a glimpse of the landscape of Italy during the Second World War, and accounts of Native American music and dancing rituals. Although it must have taken the author a lot of time to research all of this historical detail, these descriptions did nothing to advance the plot or enhance the story.

The strength of PAINTED HORSES definitely lies in its characters. With more careful editing the book would have been a better read for me. If you like archaeology, the American West, horses or historical fiction set in the 1950’s then give this book a try. The publisher is giving away a copy on Goodreads. You can add it to your shelf and enter the giveaway here:

Painted Horses (Brooks)

Painted Horses Malcolm Brooks, 2014 Grove/Atlantic 336 pp. ISBN-13: 9780802121646 Summary In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates that time and untamed landscape, in a tale of the modern and the ancient, of love and fate, and of heritage threatened by progress. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her—a canyon “as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar—the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there’s John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio Malcolm Brooks was raised in the rural foothills of the California Sierras and grew up around Gold Rush and Native American artifacts. A carpenter by trade, he has lived in Montana for most of two decades. His writing has appeared in Gray's Sporting Journal, Outside, Sports Afield , and Montana Quarterly , among others. ( From the publisher .)

Book Reviews ( Starred review .) Brooks’s debut captures the grandeur of the American West. Catherine Lemay...goes to Montana in the 1950s as a young archeologist to survey a valley for signs of native habitation.... [Her] findings threaten the balance of money and power in the community, follows a predicable course. But on the whole, this is a debut that captures a spirit of a place. Publishers Weekly ( Starred review .) Brooks delivers an authentic story, examining in gripping, page-turning prose what it means to live in the West.... An outstanding debut novel that will linger in the reader’s mind. — Donna Bettencourt Library Journal Set in an American West of the 1950s but carrying vestiges of the nineteenth century.... The book loses some credibility as it develops more contemporary plot elements, but its vividly drawn atmosphere and strong characters will keep the reader engaged. — Mark Levine Booklist A mid-1950s oater that wants to comeover all cowboy and sensitive at the same time....There's some fine writing here, especially when it comes to horses and the material culture that surrounds them, and when it comes to Western landscapes, too, for Brooks knows that in good Western writing, the land is always a character. There's also some overwriting.... Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book: • How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips) • Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction • Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart) ( We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher .)

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Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks

Introduction

In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates that time and untamed landscape, in a tale of the modern and the ancient, of love and fate, and of heritage threatened by progress. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her?a canyon ?as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar?the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there’s John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2014: Itâ??s tempting to dismiss Malcolm Brooksâ??s debut as the latest in a series of American epics treading on Cormac McCarthy territory: The Son , Fourth of July Creek , and The Kept come to mind as recent novels dealing with the darker realities of frontiers, both geographical and personal. Like The Son , Painted Horses positions itself at the moment the frontier era gives way to modernity: in mid-century Montana, a dam project threatens to flood a canyon historically inhabited by Native Americans, submerging thousands of years of Crow history under hundreds of feet of slack water. When the inexperienced Catherine Lemay is appointed to survey the canyon for cultural evidence that could thwart the dam-builders, she assumes one corner of a Faustian triangle with a scheming hydroelectric shill and the mysterious John H., a rugged, reticent horse whisperer who opens the secrets of the country to the young archaeologist. Tangled relationships, difficult decisions, and hard compromises ensue. Decades and continents are spanned, and history unfolds. Maybe weâ??ve read this before?

But dismissing Painted Horses for its Western tropes would ignore just how good this book is. Brooks's prose is stylistically bold, announcing his artistic aspirations from the opening sentence. His characters are carefully drawn, yet their intentions remain ambiguous enough to be authentically human. His Montana is vivid, wild, and broad, and itâ??s obvious that Brooks lives where he writes, and loves where he lives. Ultimately, Brooks accomplishes no small feat in this remarkable debut: a tale of literary ambition that lives comfortably inside its genre roots, but not by its conventions. --Jon Foro

Discussion Questions

Notes from the author to the bookclub, book club recommendations.

Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 5 members.

Member Reviews

A historical fiction novel about two people from different worlds who meet up in Montana. Disjointed a times, it jumps around to different characters and time periods. The two main characters finally... (read more)

This book is slow, boring, and confusing The author's style is suspect to this reader. The reader is left hanging as the author changes character, times and location with little or no segue. I was... (read more)

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Polly Castor

Fostering a new renaissance through creativity, authenticity, spirituality, and art, book review: painted horses.

This novel was a refreshing change of time and place for me. It was set mostly in the mid 1950’s in Montana. The wild west was tipping toward a new era, where history and tradition would clash with progress. The book mixes threads of horse culture, Native American culture, archeology, and big business in an unusual and unexpected way.

I loved a lot about this book: the panoramic scenery of open range and big sky, the detailed passages of masterful horsemanship, and a female protagonist with “sand” who has multiple unlikely chances for proving herself in a career dominated by men. She comes to Montana to determine whether or not there are any historical artifacts that would prevent a canyon bordering the Crow reservation from being flooded for a dam.

For me, the book’s drawback was that I didn’t need so much backstory for the two main characters, which were provided through extensive, repetitious flashbacks. Also, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the twist near the end, which I wish could have been different, but understand all too well.

I enjoyed this sweeping novel, even with its myriad detours, and give it four stars. It was distinctively different than anything else I’ve read recently, which made it especially worthwhile.

(As you can see from the book jacket, I read an autographed advance copy of this book, which was complimentary– a fact that in no way influenced this review.)

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An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917

Painted Horses

A big, enthralling debut novel of America in its ascendance, of history versus modernity, and a love story of the West, Painted Horses introduces an extraordinary new literary voice.

Imprint Grove Paperback
Page Count 400
Publication Date June 09, 2015
ISBN-13 978-0-8021-2381-7
Dimensions 5.5" x 8.25"
US List Price $16.00

About The Book

Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her—a canyon “as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar—the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there’s John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than the vanished past.

Reminiscent of the work of Wallace Stegner, Thomas McGuane, and Annie Proulx, Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent.

“Engrossing . . . The best novels are not just written but built—scene by scene, character by character—until a world emerges for readers to fall into. Painted Horses creates several worlds.” —Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)

“Extraordinary . . . both intimate and sweeping in a way that may remind readers of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient . . . . Painted Horses is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist.” —Kent Black, Boston Globe

“Malcolm Brooks’ novel has the hard thrill of the West, when it was still a new world, the tenderness of first love and the pain of knowledge. This book is a gripping, compulsively readable page-turner.” —Amy Bloom, author of Away

“ Painted Horses reads like a cross between Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms , with a pinch of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient for good measure. . . . An earnest, romantic novel.” —William J. Cobb, The Dallas Morning News

“Evocative . . . a sprawling story about horses, Montana, Native American culture, archaeology and the development of the West . . . The reader is right there with John H. as he tightens the cinch on his saddle and moves on. . . . Brooks’ prose rings true and borders on poetic when he tackles the biggest things in his novel: themes of love, what one is willing to fight for, what to give up for something held more dear and, in the end, what it takes to recover from what has been lost.” —John B. Saul, The Seattle Times

“Reminiscent of the fiery, lyrical and animated spirit of Cormac McCarthy’s Border trilogy, and the wisdom and elegance of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose , Painted Horses is its own work, a big, old-fashioned and important novel.” —Rick Bass, author of All the Land to Hold Us

“Perhaps what really sets Brooks apart as a writer is his lush, breathtaking prose that expertly captures the raw essence of an American West known for its wide-open spaces and unbridled spirit. . . . By the end of Painted Horses , it’s hard not to feel as though you’ve traveled to the end of the Earth (or beginning of time) and back in a whirlwind of dust and words. . . . This masterful book? This one’s all [Brooks’s] own.” —Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle

“There is both great beauty and muted sorrow in Brooks’s descriptions of the wild Montana landscape and John H’s vanishing way of life. . . . Painted Horses vividly evokes an earlier time, a place and a way of being that is at the cusp of great change. In his gift for the language of horses and the culture of horsemen, Brooks will inevitably recall Cormac McCarthy. And like Ivan Doig in Bucking the Sun , he mines one of the darker veins in the mythology of the American West.” —Molly Gloss, The Washington Post

“ Painted Horses is evidence that the many-peopled, colorific, panoramic, fully-wraparound, pull-you-in-by-the-heels, big-questions, literarily deft ‘Great American Novel’ still lives.” —Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

“To find such a grandly romantic novel as Painted Horses , these guarded days, is rare. Blood. Sex. War. Equine Expertise. Past versus Progress. Money versus Love and Sacred Places. One can almost hear Hollywood’s horsemen rumbling toward this tale, but Brooks’s magnificent sentences—many of them highly alliterative and rife with assonance—render these large themes tangible. . . . Brooks, a carpenter by trade, is a rigorous, top-notch craftsman of prose, abiding by the old adage, measure twice, cut once . . . . In its third act . . . Painted Horses becomes a page-turner of very special stock, with luminous phrases flying off the passing lines like red dirt from hooves. The ride is high danger, and the reader hopes dearly that Catherine and John H. can hang on.” —Chris Dombrowski, Orion

“ Painted Horses is a wonderful novel full of horses, archeology, the new West, and two fascinating women. Malcolm Brooks should be lauded for this amazing debut. Very fine.” —Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog

“As much the story of the evolution of the American West as it is the coming of age of a young woman in the 1950s. . . . So assured and epic in scope that it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel.” —Mary Amicucci, USA Today (“Booksellers tout summer’s hottest titles”)

“Malcolm Brooks has the same intuitive understanding of women that his character John H has of horses. Painted Horses is a beautiful, sensual, authentic novel. A western novel that is about so much more than the West, it is an exquisite, enthralling debut.” —Lily King, author of Euphoria

“Inspiring . . . Brooks, a Montana native, skillfully captures the vastness and austerity of his homeland, revealing both its harshness and hidden wealth. Already compared to Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy , I found Brooks’ landscape writing more lyrical and elegant. . . . A love song to the Western frontier, Painted Horses is a new, truly American, work of art.” —Leigh Baldwin, San Antonio Current

“The next great western novel . . . Vivid—and often romantic . . . The past echoes through the canyons of the West in this richly layered first novel . . . Brooks’s deeper thematic concerns . . . [are] expertly embedded in an absorbing narrative that fulfills fiction’s workaday imperatives: human drama, character development, a suspenseful plot fueled by clashing world views, each granted articulate advocates by a fair, but not impartial author. . . . His beautifully written narrative nonetheless inspires tentative hope, for both his progress-crossed lovers and the heritage they have fought to preserve.” —Wendy Smith, The Daily Beast

“From its filmic geographical canvases and epochs to its mesmerizing close-ups of men, women and horses whose weaknesses, wounds, and powers are in plain paradoxical view, Malcolm Brooks’ novel-making is always skilled and often breath-taking. There isn’t a passing landscape, archaeological wonder, minor character, dialect, or wild horse in this story that isn’t convincing. And the broken but magic horseman, John H, is for my money one of the great characters of Montana’s estimable literature.” —David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why

“Ambitious and affecting . . . A sweeping and dramatic saga . . . Brooks takes what could be a simple story and brings in a little romance and reveals the deep contradictions that are at the heart of Americans’ reverence for the West, until that reverence comes into conflict with progress. This is an important book but also an entertaining one, a book that is destined to form part of the canon of Montana literature as it preserves a piece of the past by exposing not just myth but deeper truth.” —Erin H. Turner, Big Sky Journal

“With a startlingly clear view into a past when the American West was still wild, Brooks transports readers into a breathtaking, ruthless landscape. . . . Brooks offers contrasts between past and future, morals and convention, intermingled with a breathless love for one of America’s last great wildernesses. All of the adventure and romance of the classic western novel awaits readers here, made even more vibrant by a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia. Glowing with spirit, Brooks’s debut will entrance anyone who has ever felt the call of the West.” —Jaclyn Fulwood, Shelf Awareness (Maximum Shelf)

“ Painted Horses is a gorgeous, luminous song of a novel. Malcolm Brooks not only knows landscape and history and the blood that stains it around the world, he also knows lost tribes that are merely hidden, ancient ways that yet reside forever in the few who choose to listen. This is a stunning debut and a novel that gracefully stands up to comparison with Harrison’s Legends of the Fall and McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses . But as such, it stands alone. I suspect we’ll be hearing much more from Brooks.” —Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall

“Brooks’s debut captures the grandeur of the American West.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brooks writes with a literary style well-suited to the big Montana skies. His descriptions are spot-on and at times poetic, transporting the reader back in time and into the wild lands of the unsettled west . . . The story flows like wind through the canyon, leading the reader to discoveries about nature, both earthly and human, that are as organic as it gets . . . Painted Horses is reminiscent of the classic western adventures, but is poised to set a standard of its own.” —Tara Creel, Deseret News

“ Painted Horses is the kind of finely tuned and literary love story they don’t make much of anymore. Fans of Jamie Ford’s novels, or Jim Harrison’s, will be enthralled by Malcolm Brooks. He evokes a time and a place tinged by an autumnal sun, the brass thunderclap of things ending and beginning again. Painted Horses will carry you away.” —Doug Stanton, author of the New York Times bestseller Horse Soldiers

“Brooks delivers an authentic story, examining in gripping, page-turning prose what it means to live in the West. . . . An outstanding debut novel that will linger in the reader’s mind.” —Donna Bettencourt, Library Journal (starred review)

“The changes for Catherine and John H come about slowly, all of their movements set against the rocky, rugged terrain of the canyon. Nature is unforgiving but just. The man-made forces also push them to their limits, and they understand just how delicately tradition aligns with progress. Painted Horses is a wonderfully told story, and each rich detail shows a fascinating piece of the American West.” —Jane Krebs, Bookreporter.com

“In Painted Horses , Malcolm Brooks tells a spectacular story in which an archeological adventuress searches for signs of a pre-conquest culture in the rugged depths of a Montana canyon ahead of construction of a hydroelectric dam. Real and painted horses, danger and defeat, and an enduring love affair. Kept me up through a few nights.” —William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Willow Field

“An undisputed ode to the American West.” — USA Today (online via Bookish.com)

“Set in an American West of the 1950s but carrying vestiges of the nineteenth century, and with Indian artifacts and the ancestry of wild horses going back even earlier, much of this novel, like its milieu, has a timeless feel. . . . Though some readers will rightly find in Brooks’ theme suggestions of Jim Harrison or Comac McCarthy, the lengthy wartime flashbacks nicely recall vintage Hemingway. . . . Its vividly drawn atmosphere and strong characters will keep the reader engaged.” —Mark Levine, Booklist

“A terrific novel right in the vein of Jeffrey Lent’s In The Fall and Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River . . . . What Malcolm Brooks unfolds is a love story, and a story of the creation of America as we know it.” —Miwa Messer, Barnes & Noble Review (“Up All Night: 20 Fall Picks from Discover Great New Writers”)

“Like [Philipp Meyer’s] The Son , Painted Horses positions itself at the moment the frontier era gives way to modernity. . . . Dismissing Painted Horses for its Western tropes would ignore just how good this book is. Brooks’s prose is stylistically bold, announcing his artistic aspirations from the opening sentence. His characters are carefully drawn, yet their intentions remain ambiguous enough to be authentically human. His Montana is vivid, wild, and broad, and it’s obvious that Brooks lives where he writes, and loves where he lives. Ultimately, Brooks accomplishes no small feat in this remarkable debut: a tale of literary ambition that lives comfortably inside its genre roots, but not by its conventions.” —Jon Foro, Omnivoracious (online)

“I read Malcolm Brooks’ new novel, Painted Horses , with fascination, then amazement. Big, thrilling, poignant, astonishingly confident, it is the work of a master rather than that of a first-time novelist. With a story that moves from the bombed cities and battlefields of Europe to the wild badlands of Eastern Montana, and an eye for everything from the quality of a horse to the techniques of painting and archaeology, it will draw you in and leave you dreaming. I have rarely read a novel that realized a world so well.” —Stephen Bodio, author of An Eternity of Eagles and Querencia

“Set in grandly imposing Montana in the mid-1950s and weaving together Old World and New World archaeology while vividly portraying an American West now lost, this debut also works in miniature as it deftly portrays two characters who become unlikely allies. . . . A bold, beautiful read.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (“Barbara’s Picks”)

“[A] wide-ranging, nearly untamed story . . . John H is mystery, historical and otherwise. . . . Good Reading.” —Glen Young, Petoskey News (5 out of 5 stars)

“ Painted Horses is one for the ages . . . A combination of war story, art history, cultural anthropology and archeological history of Europe and Native America, mystery/thriller, environmental activism, and a romance novel—all of which is poetically written in explicit detail and marvelous description . . . All the while and with The Rolling Stones’ ‘wild horses, wild horses, couldn’t take me away. . .’ running through my head and reminiscent of Larry McMurtry’s and Jim Harrison’s tales of wild horses and the far western Badlands of the U.S., Painted Horses did take me away and right into the thick of the story and its characters.” —Thomas Crowe, Smoky Mountain News

“The debut novel of the year . . . A courageous book, one that is at once stylistically bold and yet accessible, a page turner that is thought provoking . . . Some of the book’s most stunning bits of prose fall into Brooks’ descriptions of John H on horseback, in the canons and mountains of Montana. These passages are closer to paintings or etchings than they are to story, and it is here that Brooks reveals himself to be a prose stylist of the first order . . . Painted Horses . . . gives us truly human lives forced into positions of hard decision and lets us watch those lives unfold with a beautiful, troubled grace.” —William Hastings, Bucks County Herald

National Bestseller One of Amazon’s 100 Best Books of 2014 #1 Indie Next Great Read for August 2014 A Barnes & Noble Discover Selection Amazon Debut Spotlight for August 2014

John H propped on his elbows in the sage, raised the binoculars. Twenty-eight horses stepped from a chute in the canyon wall and he heard hooves on stone.

Two were foals only, days old and knock-kneed, attached to their mothers by an invisible tether. Other mares heaved about with swollen bellies, ready to drop their own young at any moment. The herd stallion stayed to the rear. All had solid coats, bay and blood bay and chestnut and the stud horse himself, a dun the color of alfalfa honey with a black line the length of his spine. He watched the stallion through the glass, watched him turn and test the air and shake his head hard, watched dust explode from his coat.

Once the stallion scuffled with and finally mounted another male horse, an unruly two-year colt that twice already had tangled with the herd mare. The stallion took him by the nape and began to use him like a mare and the colt fought it and scrambled away across the rocks.

He shook this off but kept his distance and when he began to goad a foal the herd mare pounced, sinking her teeth and driving him away.

Eventually the stallion would run him out for good. That, or be run out himself. The mares would come into season and the males would tangle because the chemistry of their blood demanded it. John H burned the red hue of the colt into his brain. This was the horse he would ride.

Reading Group Guide

by Kirsten Giebutowski

1. At the start of her time in Montana, when Catherine steps into a café in Miles City, her eye is caught by Charles M. Russell’s painting When the Land Belonged to God , depicting the vanished bison (pp. 7-8). At the end of the book, during her interrogation with Dub Harris, she looks past his shoulder to the Gauguin painting on the wall behind him, a depiction of Tahitian natives (p. 325). How do these paintings speak to each other and serve to bookend Catherine’s experience in Montana?

2. Initially dismissive of the art Max Caldwell shows her at Inscription Cave, Catherine says, “These can’t be very old” (p. 131). How does she lose her snobbish attitude toward New World archaeology? Does the sense of awe engendered by encounters with prehistoric artifacts differ from the awe that encounters with the Roman world give rise to?

3. The novel abounds with instances of nontraditional art imprinted on the landscape, such as the glyphs etched into the trees by Basque herders (pp. 35-6), Inscription Cave (p. 131), the animals in the rock at the ancient quarry (p. 246), and the cave paintings (p. 296). Can we set them in opposition to Elixabete Borel’s view of art as perpetuating “grand illusion” (p. 289)? Are they any more authentic than traditional art?

4. The cave where John H views the paintings (p. 296) is no longer open to visitors, since exposure to so much human traffic has seriously threatened the paintings’ preservation. Is this an example of the idea set forth in this novel, that we kill what we love? Would it have been better for the paintings to have gone undiscovered?

5. Catherine’s trust in Max Caldwell, and his actions as guide and protector, establish him as honorable. When he speaks, we are primed to listen, and he is the character chosen to offer a summation of the larger issue at stake. He says, “Greatness gets built on destruction” (p. 348) and speculates on the unquestioning coldness required of people who push projects ahead: “Maybe they’re right, to waste not a minute wondering whether they might be wrong. How would them pyramids have come to be, weren’t for slave drivers and forced labor?” (p. 348). Is it possible to build without displacing or otherwise destroying something else?

6. Hired by Catherine for her supposed insider knowledge of the sacred landscape, how does Miriam subvert expectation and resist the role of native spokesperson equipped with a repository of secret knowledge? At the same time, what does Miriam teach Catherine about Crow history and culture?

7. How do Catherine and Miriam help each other grow and serve to expand each other’s sense of self? How does each of them, in turn, play the role of mentor and student? Were you surprised that Catherine so immediately forgives Miriam’s betrayal?

8. Does Miriam’s inability to fully explain the lodge ritual cast doubt on its meaning or sacredness (p. 265)? Is ritual bound to explain itself? At the lodge ritual, “The song rose like a fever, horrifying and beautiful at once, an ancient thing with ancient meaning and ancient power utterly intact” (p. 195). Is this Catherine romanticizing and wanting the meaning and power to be intact? Is it possible to judge whether a given ritual remains significant? If the meaning of ritual fades and physical ruins are inevitably destroyed by the forces of nature, is the aim to preserve the past futile?

9. Catherine and Miriam are both still searching for their sense of identity. Consider how each of them learns to reconcile how others see them with how they see themselves. Miriam, for instance, is highly aware of how outsiders see her as a Crow Indian, but what are her blind spots? In the first part of the novel, Catherine internalizes the expectations others have for her. How does she learn to fight against them?

10. When Max Caldwell tells Catherine the sagebrush is a sacred plant, in that moment: “She felt the word as much as heard it, felt an eerie shiver she’d come to acquaint with London rubble” (p. 16). Does Catherine fetishize the sacred by reacting so strongly to the very idea of it, especially when connected to something that holds no special meaning for her? Later in the book, transfixed by the sight of migrating cranes, “Catherine found herself spellbound, detached and delivered from the passage of time” (p. 120). Does this sound like an encounter with something sacred? How do these and other scenes explore the physical and immaterial aspects of the sacred?

11. Painted Horses is rich in references to historical figures and events. Audrey Williams and Peter Grimes, for instance, were real people; Basques like Jean Bakar did emigrate to the western United States and live as sheep herders; and US mounted cavalry did participate in WWII. How do fiction and nonfiction help each other to be understood in this novel? Is what is real necessarily truer than what is imagined? Do you think a fictional account of a historical period can get at a fuller truth than a nonfiction account?

12. Could what happens to Catherine when she heads back to the quarry on her own be described as a kind of vision or hallucination (pp. 271-3)? What do you make of the mystery of Crane Girl’s stone appearing in her pocket (p. 271)? And then Catherine isn’t sure whether she sees a crane or only thinks she sees one—isn’t sure whether she hears its call or just its spirit—yet following it leads her to John H (pp. 271-4). Is there magic at work here? Intuition? Are there other moments in the novel where Catherine leaves behind her rational mind and makes an intuitive leap that pushes her toward discovery?

13. Peter Grimes tells Catherine that the camera presages the end of archaeology: “The past will come through a lens and never vanish. You and I, miss, will constitute no mystery. We will appear to the future, and the future will already know us” (p. 254). To what extent is this true? Does having our personal lives so well documented by photographs, videos, web postings, etc., create the illusion of a continual present? Is there something to be said for clearer demarcation between past, present, and future, or are these divisions always illusory? Can ending and loss be a healthy aspect of life?

14. Speaking to Catherine of how she came to archaeology, Audrey Williams says, “I suppose you become what you continue to be without even knowing it” (p. 75). This has a ring of Zen-like wisdom and the paradox of becoming what you are. Would you say this about your own life? Do we see this play out as we watch Catherine grow into her adult self? What do you make of the element of passivity described here—is there a not-knowing and letting go of the reins involved in becoming yourself?

15. Only a minor character in the novel, David is nonetheless Catherine’s fiancé, a position that would normally grant him importance in her life. Yet once she gets to Montana, Catherine all but forgets him. When her thoughts travel to home, she thinks of her father instead. What purpose, then, does David serve to develop Catherine’s story?

16. Catherine and John H both dream of lifestyles they were not born into, and in their youth, each acquires an accoutrement that promises a different future: in Catherine’s case, a rucksack that “suggested the sort of life she wanted to lead” (p. 7), and in John H’s, the Furstnow saddle he claims as his own before he has the money to buy it (p. 144). How else do Catherine and John H understand and complement each other? How does their love lead each of them at the end to sacrifice what has been dearest to them?

17. When Catherine looks at herself in the mirror after a few months in Montana, she sees a stranger: “The hard features of the ground she’d scanned and scoured and crawled across these last days had stamped a mark upon her. Her face had itself become a mirror” (p. 170). How does her time in the West bring about a psychological transformation in Catherine? What habits of thought does she cast off in Montana and how does she grow into herself? As Catherine dresses for the Crow celebration, she studies her own copper-colored face in the mirror and feels “a sort of odd pride that she might for the first time in her life pass for something other than a white girl” (p. 190). What excites Catherine about this, do you think?

18. How would you describe Malcolm Brooks’s prose style? What other writers would you compare him to? Consider the following sentence: “The tilt of the planet had outrun the legs of winter and dawn climbed early now over the wide lip of the world” (p. 163). How does the elevated lyricism in sentences like this shape your reading experience? Is this an appropriate and even expected style for telling an epic story set in a landscape of such grandeur? What would the story lose if it were told in plainer style?

19. The idea to paint the horses originates not with John H but with his friend Yakima McKee, who suggests he do so “like the red devils done . . . Rings around the eyes for magic vision . . . Couple of palm prints here and there. Rattle ol’ Adolf’s cage.” (p. 229). Does painting the horses with symbols elevate them beyond their earthly, animal selves into a more powerful spiritual realm? Do the horses become living works of art that could be compared to the painted caves and the arborglyphs? We learn that although specific paintings differ from tribe to tribe, a handprint always means “triumph over another” (p. 265). Think of where John H leaves handprints—are they always a mark of triumph or do they take on other meanings, too?

20. The Barb horses that both John H and Jack Allen are chasing are given special status over the mustangs, given the purity of their breeding line, which dates back to the horses the Spanish brought to North America. John H calls them “flesh and blood, but an artifact” (p. 306). Is there a double standard wherein it’s acceptable for us to place value on animal breeding lines, a value that would obviously be morally unacceptable when applied to human beings?

21. How does the novel explore the politics of archaeology? Is there a way out of the dilemma at the heart of what happened at Cripplegate and with the dam project, wherein, as Catherine says, things of value are “sacrificed for progress” (p. 185)? Who decides what constitutes progress and value in these situations? Do you feel disappointed in Catherine for not fighting harder? In an overdeveloped landscape where space is at a premium, can a strong argument be made for preservation by record? Can claims of a particular site’s sacredness be measured? And if so, by whom?

22. Images of the landscape being separate but uniform run throughout. A clutch of birds are so much a part of the landscape that Catherine doesn’t even see them in front of her until they take flight, “like chips of the landscape come violently alive” (p. 26). And then there are the aspens, which Catherine learns from John H are essentially all one tree, born from a single root system (p. 38). How does the novel develop this idea in other ways? Consider, for instance, what Catherine says to John H: “The hand and the mind that moved the hand survived. They were us . . . We’re them” (p. 313).

23. Midway through the novel, we read of John H’s participation in the last US mounted cavalry campaign during World War II (pp. 211-31). How does this story—not often told—add to your understanding of WWII? And to your knowledge of John H’s character? How else does the novel show old strategies or technologies giving way to new ones in the 1940s and ’50s? John H is so impressed by the German-made binoculars he acquires and by the Austrian Mannlicher rifle the gypsies offer him that he thinks, “I can’t believe we’re beating these guys” (p. 236). How does the novel explore the relationship between technology and power?

24. The idea of killing what you love recurs throughout the novel. Max Caldwell describes Jack Allen’s lust for the horses in those terms. Peter Grimes “circles the dig like an assassin, stalks with his reflex camera poised” (p. 254). And Catherine herself comes to the conclusion that “one way or another, you will kill what you love” (p. 333). Is this inevitable? Have you experienced this in your life?

25. Painted Horses is thickly overlaid with dualities of perspective: male versus female, young versus old, Native American versus Caucasian, ancient/traditional versus modern, good versus evil, lawful versus lawless, insider versus outsider, etc. Think about those categories and consider where in the book the lines between them become blurred.

26. Does the showdown at the end of the book between Catherine and Dub Harris seem familiar (pp. 324-34)? Where else have you seen these arguments rehearsed, either in your lifetime or in history? Harris labels Catherine an idealist, thereby positioning himself as a realist. Do you think this is a misrepresentation?

27. What role does Miriam’s great-grandmother play in the larger story? How does the story Miriam tells of her great-grandfather’s role in the battle of Greasy Grass add to the context of the novel (121-6)? Even if the Mountain Crow and River Crow had come together in opposing the dam, would they have stood a chance against Harris Power and Light?

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner; Some Horses: Essays by Thomas McGuane; Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison; Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry; The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy; The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana by Rick Bass; The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich; She Had Some Horses: Poems by Joy Harjo; The Meadow by James Galvin; The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig; The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick; The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists by Gregory Curtis; From the Heart of the Crow Country: The Crow Indians’ Own Stories by Joseph Medicine Crow; The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky

Author Q&A

Q: Describe the path that brought you to writing. How long has this novel been developing?

A: I was raised in a pretty rigid, pretty sheltered religious environment, and early-on had the sense of being sort of an oddball, the kid who learned to escape through the alternate universe of books and reading. I went to public school for the first time in the eighth grade, and my English teacher, Marcia Callenberger, gave me a book that changed my life, because it made me want to be a writer too. Lonesome Dove was unlike anything I knew existed, a hilarious, character-driven epic that followed no formula but struck me in the heart like nothing before.

I knocked around the West in my early twenties, learning carpentry along the way to support myself and attempting college in fits and starts. I read like crazy, discovering Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Ondaatje, knowing I wanted to be a writer but not quite knowing what sort of writer I wanted to be, like a guitarist with a schizoid devotion to both Segovia and Angus Young. Thomas McGuane struck a chord with me because he was clearly connected to so many things I myself had a love for—horses and fly-fishing, bird shooting and the West and above all stylish writing.

I finally landed in Missoula, Montana in my mid-twenties, tackling an English degree in earnest and finding my way to literary parties and events through my then-girlfriend, a poet and MFA candidate. I hunted a lot and rode horses when I could, wrote a couple of novels I hated and began to publish essays and short stories in magazines, then landed a job as a writer and consultant for an outdoor television company, all the while concocting this novel in my head, this huge, sprawling book that would somehow connect the dots of everything I’d ever been consumed by—archaeology and the West, Basques and Indians and the Lascaux cave, hunting and horses and the inevitable pros and cons of progress.

After six years of morning and evening and weekend writing I named it PAINTED HORSES.

Q: Was there a specific reason you went with a female protagonist?

A: Initially, long before the actual writing began, John H was going to be front and center the entire time, but as I was putting all the various conceptual pieces together, I realized Catherine couldn’t be a mere plot device or a love interest if I wanted to tell the most fully human story I could tell. Plus I wanted to capture the era as well as I could. I think we tend to look back on the ’60s as the time of real change and conflict and paradox and upheaval, but the ’50s had plenty of that too, and in ways that could significantly affect women.

Q: PAINTED HORSES deals with technological progress and the erasure of tradition on several fronts. Can you talk a bit about the friction between those two forces and how it drives your writing forward?

A: This is a great question, because it makes me realize I’m as much a creature of paradox as anything else, which undoubtedly informs my writing. I myself can be quite a Luddite—I’ve got to be one of the last Facebook holdouts—but I don’t ever want to give up jet air travel, hot showers, iPods, and antibiotics, among other things. Bob Dylan, Talking Heads. Life and culture are malleable, and protean, and obviously life goes on, but at the same time, part of the price of progress, especially on the scale we’ve been capable of since the Industrial Revolution, is probably for lack of a better word spiritual, the danger of losing our own sense of the whole magical trajectory of what it means and has meant to be human. And paradoxically, it’s often modern progress that cracks the lid on long lost things to begin with—the only known Clovis burial site in North America was discovered by bulldozer during a drain field project.

Q: Can you tell us a little about the US Army’s last mounted cavalry in World War II?

A: This was the springboard for the entire novel. I only knew about the ad hoc World War II cavalry in Italy because of a chance conversation when I was 19. I worked for my father’s construction company, and he had a retired equine vet for a client at one point who hung around the jobsite all day. I was then and still tend to be the guy who sits there at wedding receptions and birthday parties and talks to old people when nobody else seems to want to, and over the years I’ve heard some really amazing stories as a result. This guy figured out that I liked horses, liked hunting, and so on, and he would just sit there and jaw with me.

Eventually he told me he’d been a part of the last U.S. mounted cavalry effort, in World War II Italy, and I was just fascinated by the whole notion because I’d never had a clue such a thing had ever occurred. Over the years I tried to find a reference to what he was talking about in history books and whatnot, and other than a really oblique aside here and there, came up for the most part pretty blank. Then when the Internet realized its full potential I tracked down an old magazine story in an Army publication called Cavalry Journal, from 1942. It was a full-length feature on exactly what he had described to me, with really amazing anecdotes and photos. It’s still the only significant source material I’ve been able to find.

Q: And how about Londinium?

A: I knew a bit about post-Blitz archaeology, and definitely knew it was instrumental in the modern concept of salvage or rescue archaeology. Really the germ of Catherine’s backstory came from my former mother-in-law, who went to England on a Fulbright to study the clarinet in the early ’50s. Although she didn’t so far as I know encounter any of the digs, I had a sense that these really interesting and significant excavations were going on right in the same era she was living there. And I knew about the history of London generally, as a Roman frontier fort initially, and Boudicca’s Revolt, and so on. So once I decided to place Catherine in circumstances similar to ones I knew to be true, I started to research the actual history and logistics of Grimes’s London digs, and the literal pandemonium created by the temple discovery, and it just opened this amazing world that happened to work beautifully for my own purposes with Catherine. Coincidentally, the Walbrook area is currently being re-excavated right now, for the first time since the post-Blitz excavations I describe in the novel.

Q: Tell us about your history with horses.

A: I think my interest goes back to the womb, or nearly so. My mother grew up on a farm in South Jersey, and was one of those girls who lived, slept, and breathed horses. When I was born, she owned what had been the New York State champion trail horse, a gigantic palomino named Brushmaker. I still remember him from when I was very, very small—he was nearly seventeen hands, practically draft horse height. The first time I was on horseback by myself I was probably four or five, again at my grandparents’ farm. I tried to jump a ditch and instantly fell off, but just as instantly climbed back on which I guess says something about my interest level at least.

I rode as much as I could at the farm for a few years, and badly wanted a horse of my own when we moved out to northern California—we lived in the heart of endurance riding country, and I wanted to try my hand at it but never did get to. Luckily we had friends down the road with a number of fiery little Arabians, and I rode those horses all the time in high school. You had to have your wits about you because they weren’t polite horses by any means, but I learned to ride fairly well on a pretty rough landscape.Nowadays I mostly ride my neighbor’s horses—he’s eighty-two and has Missouri Foxtrotters, which are a gaited horse in the manner of a Tennessee Walker. I don’t consider myself any sort of vocational expert, but I have spent a fair amount of time around horses, and have always had a pretty intense interest. Some of it’s almost certainly totemic—the impact of horse domestication on human culture is obviously incalculable, and really embedded I think in certain people’s psyches. Evidently I’m one of them.

Q: How has your experience living in Montana shaped your writing?

A: I actually fell in love with the idea of Montana long before I ever visited, thanks to my first subscription to Field & Stream . Then in my teens, Lonesome Dove and Legends of the Fall really set the hook. Of course once I got here, the myth didn’t totally square with the reality.

Montana is in many ways this sort of retrograde place, and obviously sort of mythologized for unsullied, pristine wilderness, and yet it’s also home to the largest Superfund site in America, or one of them. Economically it can be very difficult to make a reasonable living here, but real estate values at the same time are astronomical. There’s tension between environmentalists and developers, between resident and non-resident landowners, between the tribal and state and federal governments, between fishing guides and cattle ranchers’ you name it.

I guess I’m saying Montana is a place of pretty pronounced dualities, and the tension of dualities, and that can be major fodder for a writer. And visually, for a person who basically worships beauty, it is indeed breathtaking.

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COMMENTS

Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks
Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman's vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent. 367 pages, Hardcover.
PAINTED HORSES
A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller's readership to mushroom like one of Circe's spells. Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters. Pub Date: April 10, 2018. ISBN: 978--316-55634-7.
Painted Horses
Painted Horses. by Malcolm Brooks. Publication Date: June 9, 2015. Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction. Paperback: 384 pages. Publisher: Grove Press. ISBN-10: 0802123813. ISBN-13: 9780802123817. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her --- a canyon "as deep as the devil's own appetites.".
Painted Horses
Painted Horses. Written by Malcolm Brooks Review by Jo Ann Butler. In the mid-1950s, Catherine Lemay goes to London to study music. Instead, she falls in love with archeology. Battered by German bombs only a decade before, the city's Roman ruins enchant Catherine, and she helps salvage a unique temple which blocks post-war rebuilding.
'Painted Horses,' by Malcolm Brooks: review
This one's all his own. Alexis Burling 's reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Oregonian. E-mail: [email protected]. Painted Horses. By Malcolm Brooks ...
Summary and reviews of Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks
This information about Painted Horses was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter.Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication.
'Painted Horses' by Malcolm Brooks
Book review 'Painted Horses' by Malcolm Brooks. By Kent Black Globe Correspondent, August 16, 2014, 6:00 p.m. istockphoto/iStock. There is an exchange between two characters in Malcolm Brooks ...
Book Review: Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks
August 19, 2014. Malcolm Brooks's debut Painted Horses walks the steady line of genre archetypes without veering into stereotype. It's an old-fashioned novel, sweeping in scope and probing of character, without leaning on showy language and post-modern literary gimmicks. Sure, you have a somewhat rote plot and a slightly under-written ...
'Painted Horses,' by Malcolm Brooks
Books Book Reviews Fiction Nonfiction April books 50 notable fiction books. ... "Painted Horses" vividly evokes an earlier time, a place and a way of being that is at the cusp of great change.
Review: Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks
When I picked up Painted Horses and read the first line I cringed: "London, even the smell of it." But despite the fact that this story begins with a sentence fragment I read on. Catherine Lemay grows up as the only child of well-to-do parents who live in the outskirts of New York City.
Painted Horses
Painted Horses. Malcolm Brooks. Grove Press, 2014 - Fiction - 370 pages. 10 Reviews. Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified. In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild.
Painted Horses (Brooks)
Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman's vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent. ... Book Reviews (Starred review.) Brooks's debut captures ...
Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks Reading Guide-Book Club Discussion
Editorial Review. An Amazon Best Book of the Month, ... Like The Son, Painted Horses positions itself at the moment the frontier era gives way to modernity: in mid-century Montana, a dam project threatens to flood a canyon historically inhabited by Native Americans, submerging thousands of years of Crow history under hundreds of feet of slack ...
Book Review: Painted Horses
This novel was a refreshing change of time and place for me. It was set mostly in the mid 1950's in Montana. The wild west was tipping toward a new era, where history and tradition would clash with progress.
Painted Horses: A Novel Kindle Edition
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2014: It's tempting to dismiss Malcolm Brooks's debut as the latest in a series of American epics treading on Cormac McCarthy territory: The Son, Fourth of July Creek, and The Kept come to mind as recent novels dealing with the darker realities of frontiers, both geographical and personal. Like The Son, Painted Horses positions itself at the moment ...
Painted Horses: Brooks, Malcolm: 9780802123817: Amazon.com: Books
Malcolm Brooks has the same intuitive understanding of women that his character John H has of horses. Painted Horses is a beautiful, sensual, authentic novel. A western novel that is about so much more than the West, it is an exquisite, enthralling debut.". Lily King, author of Euphoria.
Painted Horses
Painted Horses. A big, enthralling debut novel of America in its ascendance, of history versus modernity, and a love story of the West, Painted Horses introduces an extraordinary new literary voice. Malcolm Brooks was raised in the rural foothills of the California Sierras, where Gold Rush and Native American artifacts still abound.
Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks, Paperback
Editorial Reviews. Praise for Painted Horses: National Bestseller One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2014 #1 Indie Next Great Read for August 2014 A Barnes & Noble Discover Selection Amazon Debut Spotlight for August 2014 "Engrossing . . . The best novels are not just written but built—scene by scene, character by character—until a world ...
Painted Horses: Malcolm Brooks: 9781483013558: Amazon.com: Books
Painted Horses. MP3 CD - MP3 Audio, August 5, 2014. In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates that time and untamed landscape in a tale of the modern and the ancient, of ...
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Painted Horses: A Novel
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Painted Horses: A Novel at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users.
Book Review: Chasing Painted Horses by Drew Hayden Taylor
The Horse grows, and with it the children, and with it the story. This novel is a literary masterpiece. It is deep and symbolic and meaningful, while also by turns funny, suspenseful, and gut-wrenching. The children's view of the world and of problem-solving; their clear-cut solutions vs. the reality of the bureaucratic, adult side of ...

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The Inheritance of Loss

The Blindness of the Heart

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