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

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