Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel

"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

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls is an engaging, vividly told "true-life novel" that paints a rich portrait of resilience and determination. Through the voice of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, Walls delivers a captivating account of life in the American West, filled with hardship, grit, and a fierce spirit of independence. Lily's character is drawn with such strength and authenticity that readers can't help but feel a deep connection to her journey. Walls’ storytelling shines with its clear, forthright prose, bringing Lily’s world and its challenges to life in a way that is both inspiring and deeply moving.

I so looked forward to reading this book - The Glass Castle was such a beautiful and profound work, that perhaps my expectations were simply too high.

I found Half Broke Horses to be pedestrian and uninspired, full of stock characters that are disappointingly predictable and one-dimensional. The father with his head in the clouds; the languishing mother who considers herself above their hard-scratch life; the philandering salesman who two-times his wife; the sister who goes to Hollywood, gets pregnant, and hangs herself in the kitchen; and - of course - the scrappy heroine who's simply faster, better, smarter and sassier than just about everyone in her life, you betcha.

Beyond this, the story itself has no core. I kept waiting for the random events to coalesce into the revelation of some deeper truth or insight, as Walls so adeptly developed in her first book. It never happened; instead, we were presented with a pedantic timeline of events and often pointless anecdotes in one woman's life - strung together with no perceivable higher purpose. As I slowly realized that there was no "there" there - and never would be - my interest waned and I moved quickly through the story to its end.

Given the admittedly sparse information on her grandmother's life, Walls could have taken the details at hand and used them to create a series of short stories - stand-alone depictions of a period of time - each of which could have been crafted and honed and shaped to offer thought-provoking insights upon which to reflect. Such a series of short stories could have been within the context of a collection ... each story told from a different character's viewpoint, perhaps, and with a different "voice" - yet with the cumulative effect of leaving the reader with a richer understanding of our country's pioneers, and the land that shaped them.