Painted Horses, Malcolm Brooks
Painted Horses, Malcolm Brooks
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Painted Horses

Author: Malcolm Brooks

Narrator: Julia Whelan

Unabridged: 13 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/05/2014

Synopsis

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 that 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 US 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.

About Malcolm Brooks

Malcolm Brooks is the author of the acclaimed novels Painted Horses and Cloudmaker. His writing has also appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Outside, Sports Afield, and Montana Quarterly, among others. He was raised in the rural foothills of the California Sierras. A carpenter by trade, he has lived in Montana for most of two decades.

About Julia Whelan

Julia Whelan, a former child actress best known for her award-winning work on ABC's Once and Again, began narrating and directing audiobooks after graduating from college with a degree in English and creative writing. She has garnered many positive reviews, won multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, and was named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of 2010. Two of Julia's audiobooks were shortlisted for the American Library Association's notable recordings of 2010. Her "flawless" narration of Jandy Nelson's The Sky Is Everywhere earned a place in the first round of 2011 Grammy nominations for Best Spoken Word Album. In addition to her work in young adult fiction, her audiobook credits include memoir (Jenny McCarthy's Love, Lust, and Faking It), women's fiction, supernatural thrillers, and nonfiction.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jameson

Tom McIntyre, himself a damn good writer, once explained to me why he wouldn't read any of the NY Times ballyhooed best sellers: "They're all written by middleclass kids from nice middleclass suburbs who went to good schools and good colleges, and then on to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and then moved......more

Goodreads review by Nicole

Malcolm Brooks’ PAINTED HORSES has a beautiful cover. The blurb on the back of my copy of the book reads almost as beautiful. Few readers wouldn’t get hooked by the romanticism and untouched landscape alluded to by talk of the open Montana range in the 1950s. It’s another time and it’s another place......more

Goodreads review by Jim

Malcolm Brooks is a very talented writer. He consistently uses words to color his scenes so well that the reader can smell and hear what his characters are experiencing and the characters themselves emerge as complete and complex beings who evoke the full range of human emotion. The central characte......more

Goodreads review by Judy

I loved this book! Everything about it. If it had not been for one of my reading groups I may never have heard of it and that would have been a shame. A beyond plucky heroine, a young archaeologist, is hired by the Smithsonian Institute to find any historical relics that will end up under water once......more

Quotes

“An undisputed ode to the American West.” USA Today

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

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

“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.” Washington Post

“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.” AudioFile

“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 (starred review)

“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.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“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.” Library Journal (audio review)

“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.” Booklist

“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, New York Times bestselling author

Awards

  • Amazon Best Book of the Month
  • Amazon Editors' Pick
  • Barnes & Noble Biggest Book
  • Barnes & Noble Discover Award
  • Amazon Best Book
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