The title refers to the label on a skeleton gathering dust in the Smithsonian’s attic. Like March, Horse focuses on a character, while also centering on objects, like People of the Book. It combines March’s focus on the American Civil War with People of the Book’s multiple narrators. Horse brings together the best parts of Brooks’s earlier work. Brooks’s novels don’t just use history as backdrop they plumb the depths of the past in search of wisdom for the present. People of the Book (2008) follows a Jewish manuscript from medieval Spain to modern Bosnia through exile, conflict, and genocide. A transcendentalist compelled to enter the Union Army, he is a man of ideas struggling to become a man of action. Her Pulitzer Prize-winner, March (2005), spotlights the taciturn father from Little Women. “Historical fiction” may be one name for Geraldine Brooks’s craft, but that label doesn’t do her novels justice.
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