Sport of Kings (Morgan) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[R]avishing and ambitious…a mud-flecked epic, replete with fertile symbolism, that hurtles through generations of Kentucky history. On its surface, The Sport of Kings has enough incident (arson, incest, a lynching, miscegenation, murder) to sustain a 1980s-era television mini-series.… But Ms. Morgan is not especially interested in surfaces, or in conventional plot migrations. She's an interior writer, with deep verbal and intellectual resources. She fills your head with all that exists in hers, and that is quite a lot—she has a special and almost Darwinian interest in consanguinity, in the barbed things that are passed on in the blood of people and of horses, like curses, from generation to generation…Ms. Morgan's prose has some of [Terrence Malick's] elastic sense of time. Her pace frequently slows to a dream-crawl as she scrutinizes the natural world as if cell by cell. Then, with the flick of a thoroughbred's tail, we are catapulted generations forward or back.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

The Sport of Kings…abounds with Faustian characters and dangerous learning…C. E. Morgan [possesses]…a boundless breadth of knowledge on the darker history of humans and horses in Kentucky…[a] riverine, gorgeously textured novel…There is life, wild joy and finally salvation in the language itself. C. E. Morgan has more nerve, linguistic vitality and commitment to cosmic thoroughness in one joint of her little finger than the next hundred contemporary novelists have in their entire bodies and vocabularies
Jaimy Gordon - New York Times Book Review


Morgan has dared to write the kind of book that was presumed long extinct: a high literary epic of America.
Telegraph (UK)


Sport of Kings boasts a plot that maintains tension and pace, and Morgan weaves its characters, its themes, its several histories together in a marvelous display of literary control and follow-through.
Christian Science Monitor


[A] rich and compulsive new novel.… This book confirms [Morgan] as the new torchbearer of the Southern Gothic tradition.… What emerges is a panoramic view of race relations in America, from the slow crumbling of the Jim Crow laws until shortly before the election of Barack Obama, with occasional glimpses into the more distant past. Racing provides the novel’s overarching metaphor for race (a set of tracks that determine the course of a life, and for which the correct breeding is essential), and Morgan’s white characters are hardly less constricted by history than her black ones.… It’s a bleak and bitter inversion of the American dream — a world in which circumstances are impossible to change, and legacies impossible to shake.… [Morgan is]…an immersive storyteller.… Her prose is often ravishingly beautiful, displaying an unerring instinct for metaphor and music.
Financial Times (UK)


Remarkable achievement.… The Sport of Kings hovers between fiction, history, and myth, its characters sometimes like the ancient ones bound to their tales by fate, its horses distant kin to those who drew the chariot of time across the sky . . . Novelists can do things that other writers can’t—and Morgan can do things that other novelists can’t.… Tremendous, the work of a writer just starting to show us what she can do.
New Yorker


[A]sprawling, magisterial Southern Gothic for the twenty-first century.
Oprah Magazine


[E]njoyable if overwritten…. The novel starts strong out of the gate…then blows it in the backstretch with a series of melodramatic incidents that undermines the care with which Morgan has created these larger-than-life characters. However, …the novel’s authentically pungent shed-row atmosphere, [is] ultimately satisfying as a mint julep on Derby Day.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Though set in the 21st century, the narrative establishes each character's backstory to reveal how the tendrils of …racial history continue to color and coil around the present.… A dense meditation on the ugliness that undergirds much of the sublime we as humans strive for and admire in life. —Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
Library Journal


C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings takes the kind of dauntless, breathtaking chances readers once routinely expected from the boldest of American novels.… It is a profoundly orchestrated work that is both timeless and up-to-the-minute in its concerns, the most notable of which is what another Kentucky-bred novelist, Robert Penn Warren, once labeled "the awful responsibility of time."
Judges' panel - Kirkus Prize for Fiction


(Starred review.) [A]n epic novel steeped in American history and geography.… Vaultingly ambitious, thrillingly well-written, charged with moral fervor and rueful compassion. How will this dazzling writer astonish us next time?
Kirkus Reviews