RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis riverine, gorgeously textured novel is highly ambivalent about the encyclopedic knowledge that it delivers ... Henrietta [is] possibly the most intellectually resplendent heroine I’ve met in a novel ... One curious pattern that repeats itself often in Morgan’s Southern Gothic plot is a kind of murderous tattling, in which one character tells the truth to another and mayhem results, sweeping away the guilty with the less guilty ... The Sport of Kings can be wearing. Some of Morgan’s black characters are so crushed by pain and misfortune one can hardly bear to read on. But I read on. 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.
