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Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel |  | Author: Jeannette Walls
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy Used: $8.40
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Seller: Books Squared
Rating:  224 reviews
Sales Rank: 311
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 1416586288
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781416586289
ASIN: 1416586288
Publication Date: October 6, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle was "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly). Now she brings us the story of her grandmother -- told in a voice so authentic and compelling that the book is destined to become an instant classic. "Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane, and, with her husband, ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle. Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa or Beryl Markham's West with the Night. It will transfix readers everywhere.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 224
 Everything Good is Worth Waiting For! July 22, 2009
Sylviastel
190 out of 201 found this review helpful
Jeannette Walls struck gold when she published her personal memoir, "The Glass Castle, a few years back. Her own unusual upbringing touched a spot in people's hearts and minds. I highly recommend the book for schools especially for teens. When you look at Jeannette Walls, you see a sophisticated and intelligent woman who looked like she came out of private boarding schools. The reality is that Jeannette came from poverty where her parents' roaming lifestyle led to them even being homeless on the streets.
In this book, Jeannette wants to write about her mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, but ends up writing about her mother's mother, Lily Casey Smith, who herself was quite a character. Her maternal grandmother was born in 1901 in the Southwest. Like her descendents such as Jeannette and Rosemary, she defied conventional living. She became a school teacher during World War I in Arizona and living in Chicago where she worked as a servant and went to school.
Lily had faced not only adversity for being a woman but she had faced the tragic losses of her best friend in Chicago, Minnie, and the suicide of her sister, Helen. Her first marriage was a sham and her second marriage to older Jim Smith would produce her two children. Lily's life is brought to life by Rosemary and others recollections.
Jeannette writes lovingly about her grandmother and brings her character to life. Lily's life was no picnic and her early years on the ranch with her book-smart father, mother, and siblings-Buster and Helen provide an interesting portrait of life in the American Southwest before World War I.
It's interesting since Jeannette Walls last surprised us with her memoirs to note that she is no longer a social or gossip columnist in New York City's Upper West Side. She and her husband have traded their city lives for a country life in Northern Virginia complete with their own set of beloved horses.
unforgettable August 15, 2009
Lorel Shea (New England)
25 out of 29 found this review helpful
Jeannette Walls captivated me with her own life story in her first book, The Glass Castle. In Half Broke Horses, she tells her maternal grandmother's tale, from a first person perspective. This book is equally riveting. The story opens with a desperate urgency as a flash flood threatens to drown young Lily and her siblings. Lily's quick thinking saves them, and as they wade home the next day, the children's mother declares that God has saved them because she has been on her knees praying all night. She insists that the exhausted kids get down on there knees and pray.
Lily has a strong voice right from the beginning: "There weren't no guardian angel, Dad," I said. I started explaining how I'd gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them.
Dad squeezed my shoulder, "Well, darling, maybe the angel was you."
Lily grows up with the idea that she can do anything she makes up her mind to do. She is fearless and her spunk and quick mind get her out of plenty of scrapes. Her unconventional behavior must have really stood out in her time.
As a young woman, Lily works briefly as a maid to wealthy city folk. But she doesn't let domestic chores weigh her down at her own home. When Lily and her husband are employed running a ranch, she cooks nothing but beans and steak. The hands and the family wore shirts backward and inside out before washing them.
"Levi's we didn't wash at all. They shrank too much, and it weakened the threads. So we wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil, and them we wore them some more. Eventually, the Levi's reached a point of grime saturation where they couldn't get any dirtier, where they had the feel of oilskin and had become not just waterproof but briar-proof, and that was when you knew you had really broken them in. When Levi's reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn't pay a cowboy to let you wash his."
The writing is consistent and smooth, so that one hardly thinks about the words and just "lives" through them alongside Lily and her adventures. Not exactly an angel, Lily sells moonshine during prohibition. She works so hard at all she does that a double courseload at college feels like a vacation.
She can break a horse, read the weather, teach school, drive a car, and fly a plane. Her story is amazing, simultaneously inspiring and sad. Those who enjoyed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Angela's Ashes will love Half Broke Horses.
One Of The Best Books I've Read...... September 17, 2009
AuburnTygr (Brent, AL USA)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
As a life long fan of Little House on the Praire I couldn't pass up the opportunity to read a book compared to Little House. The book is everything it promises. I couldn't put it down and had to read it a second time because I enjoyed it so much. I found myself sympathizing with Lily at times and at others laughing out loud at some of her antics and the way she handled situations.
Some readers might find some the accounts in this book hard to believe. I wasn't alive during the Great Depression but was raised by parents and family members that lived during that era. I've heard many stories told over and over by these relatives of survival, making the best of bad situations and doing with what you had. I so enjoyed listening to my relatives tell their stories and found Jeanette Wall's book enthralling and similar in many ways.
If you are a Little House Fan I would highly recommend this book. I only wish I had read Jeanette Wall's firs book The Glass Castle prior to reading this book but I've now ordered it and can't wait to read it.
A Fascinating Woman - Another Winner for Jeannette Walls August 5, 2009
M. D. Stern (Yorba Linda, CA United States)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
I read Jeannette Walls' first book, "The Glass Castle," and it blew me away. When the opportunity arose to read this, her second book, I was thrilled. In "Half Broke Horses," Ms. Walls focuses on her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, and her life from birth until the time of Ms. Walls' birth.
I'd remembered the character of Lily Smith from "The Glass Castle," and what a strong woman she seemed to be. This book proves that impression. In the words of Jeannette Walls - Lily Casey Smith was "some character!" Born in a dirt "dug out" in west Texas, raised on ranches in Texas and New Mexico, an itinerant school teacher at the age of 15 in rural Arizona - and that's just the beginning. This was a woman of character, strength, dignity, values, and integrity. This is a woman I would have liked to have met.
I enjoyed the job Ms. Walls did with this work. I feel she did her research, and was sensitive and fair with her presentation. I think I even enjoyed this work more than "The Glass Castle," but that might be because her previous book had far more depressing material than this one.
I came away from this book feeling really good - I enjoyed my time with Lily Casey Smith. I felt that she had imparted some things to me that would allow me to pause and consider life in a different way. I think she would like that. And I feel Jeannette Walls did her grandmother proud.
Get the Lace Knocked Off Your Panties! November 8, 2009
Tara (Utah)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
What a fun, delightful read! As you probably already know, the author wrote this "true life" novel about her very own grandmother, Lily Smith. It covers her life from the early 1900s to the 1950s. Her story takes readers to the wild Texas west, 1920s Chicago, and both the ranch life and city life of Arizona. Lily plays many a role. Besides being a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and eventually a grandmother, Lily at some time or another steps into the role of teacher, bus driver, horse racer, horse trainer, maid, gas pumper, rancher, lady pilot, and even a taxi driver. The novel, told from her point of view, tells about her parents, the land, the weather, her pregnant sister, job losses, foreclosures, suicide, and the trials of having a thirteen year old daughter that skinny dips with the ranch hands. And let's not forget her failed first marriage, a story of its own.
I had a favorite part or two I just have to mention so everybody can get the gist of this darn good yarn. I especially liked the part in which Lily is teaching in Arizona in a mostly Mormon one room school house and tries to show the young girls under her tuition that "there were other things they could do besides being brood mares dressed in feed sacks." That just goes to show, what kind of woman Lily was. I laughed with absolute glee when she aimed her gun at stalking Uncle Eli and said "you come round here again, you better be wearing your wonder underwear.."
This is truly a great book that shouldn't be missed. I recommend it to women everywhere that like to read about other strong women. As Lily would say, "you'll get the lace knocked off your panties!"
Showing reviews 1-5 of 224
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