Coal Black Horse

Robert Olmstead won the Heartland Prize for Fiction and the Ohioana Book Award for this novel, and the critical acclaim is earned. Fourteen-year-old Robey Childs rides out from Virginia on a powerful black horse to find his Confederate father and bring him home — and the story that follows does not soften the Battle of Gettysburg or its aftermath. Olmstead's prose is spare and poetic, and the combination of beautiful sentences with unflinching depictions of war's brutality is what makes the book distinctive. NPR, Kirkus, and other outlets called it powerful and essential. Parents and readers sensitive to graphic content should know upfront: the battlefield violence and wartime atrocities are significant and explicit. This is not a book for children or young teens. For adult readers ready for an honest, literary reckoning with what war actually costs, it is a remarkable piece of Civil War fiction.