Painted Horses

Reviews

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There is both great beauty and muted sorrow in Brooks’ 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.”

“Brooks’s debut captures the grandeur of the American West. Catherine Lemay, a former pianist, goes to Montana in the 1950s as a young archeologist to survey a valley for signs of native habitation before the area is flooded by a hydroelectric project…This is a debut that captures a spirit of a place.”

“Julia Whelan narrates this modern-day Western with panache and strength…Whelan delivers the stark descriptions of Montana with feeling and draws the listener into the atmosphere. She provides deep empathy for Catherine as she makes a choice that will affect many lives, especially her own.”

“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.”

“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…Vividly drawn atmosphere and strong characters will keep the reader engaged.”

“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.”

“An undisputed ode to the American West.”

“His Montana is vivid, wild, and broad…[a] remarkable debut.”

“Extraordinary…Intimate and sweeping…Painted Horses is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist.”

“Wonderful…Stirring descriptions of horses and Western landscapes echo the characters’ preservationist motives. Julia Whelan portrays the many characters of the novel deeply and distinctly.”

Expand reviews