Jeannette Walls

The author offers a novel based on the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed 500 miles on a pony as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children, including Rosemary Smith Walls, portrayed in the author's acclaimed The Glass Castle. Includes reading-group guide. Reprint. A New York Times Best Book of the Year.

A True-Life Novel

Half Broke Horses

The author offers a novel based on the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed 500 miles on a pony as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children, including Rosemary Smith Walls, portrayed in the author's acclaimed The Glass Castle.

Super interesting life story told by the author, whose life was similarly interesting and inspiring. 

Alicia Evans

Ainsley Jeffery

I read "The Glass Castle" in one sitting in grade twelve, and called it my favourite book for about the following year. It introduced me to truly loving the story of a memoir- thinking its fiction and then reflecting on how lived experiences are just an enthralling as fiction. Overall, Half Broke Horses was similar, read in one sitting and a good read. I liked the story and it made me think strongly on how families look different for everyone. 

For me, the spirit of perseverance overcame everything else about this book. "I hadn't been much paying attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn't care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me" (pp. 113)

I didn't love the writing as much as The Glass Castle, and maybe its not fair to compare the two, but I feel like I was expecting a story that wasn't there. No doubt was this a good read, but it failed to take me to a place that The Glass Castle did. 

Overall, I would still recommend this story but hand in hand with Jeannette Walls other novels as well, as I don't think I would have enjoyed this as much without it.

Melissa Palmer

This book told the story of Lily, grandmother of the author of The Glass Castle. Lily was tough...breaking horses, working on a ranch, teaching school, driving, flying planes. This memoir was full of grit. I enjoyed it.

Jeannette Ordas

I loved Jeannette Walls own memoir about growing up in her crazy family, so I was very excited when this finally made it to my library holds pile. This novel is really like an oral history of Jeannette's own grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who lived life at a breakneck pace - breaking & training horses, riding her horse 500 miles to go teach at a one room school house at 16, living in big cities and isolated communities and flying planes. This book jumps from one riveting tale to the next and while there isn't a whole lot of introspection, the only real discovery is that adventure will live on, passing down the family line.

Caitlin Baker

A newfound favorite book! Even though it was a memoir for her grandmother, the book reads like a novel. 

“Laura Ingalls-Wilder for adults” pretty much sums it up.

Laurel Ann Smith

At first I thought I wouldn't get engaged in the stories, but I was wrong! Her life was quite an adventure purely out of necessity and it was very entertaining!

Emily

Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.

Jeannette Walls does it again with a really great depiction of true resilience and strength. While this is technically considered a "novel," it details the true life of Lily Casey Smith, and nearly serves as a "prequel" to Walls' most well-known work The Glass Castle. 

I honestly don't really know what to say when it comes to her books, because I feel like she says it all so much better. The stories of those in her family, and her outlook on them, are truly astonishing. I admire her and Smith for their demeanors and perseverance. They remind me to feel so much more grateful about everything in my current situation. Even sad things can hold happiness. 

The voice in each of her books resonates with me because I believe in so many of the same values as she does. Her books make me have more faith in myself and my place in this vast world, because they show that one has the power to get things done if they just try hard enough. Even when you are at the complete and total rock bottom (in the cases of Walls and Smith, this is quite literal), there is always something you can do. There is always something to live for, and something to try. You just might need to get a little crafty. 

Hope for the best and plan for the worst.

A mantra I already live by, and one that was beautifully stated within this book.

Andrea Badgley

Half Broke Horses, set in Texas and Arizona, is a true life novel of Lily Casey Smith, author Jeannette Walls’s sassy, swaggering pioneer grandma. Fans of Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle will appreciate going deeper into the Walls family history with Half Broke Horses, which takes us back to the beginning, when Walls’s grandmother, Lily, broke horses on her family ranch as a girl, and as a young teen rode 500 miles, alone, on her horse, Patches, from Texas to Arizona to take a teaching job in the 1920s. Walls calls this a novel because it was necessary that she fill in details and recreate dialogue, but the voice and wild events, like Lily’s grand entrance in her ranch town’s premier of Gone With the Wind, to which she wore a dress she made from curtains, are authentic and amusing. Lily is spunky and resourceful, a pioneer woman, and I loved her sass:

“Don’t you ‘little lady’ me,” I said. “I break horses. I brand steers. I run a ranch with a couple dozen crazy cowboys on it, and I can beat them all in poker. I’ll be damned if some nincompoop is going to stand there and tell that that I don’t have what it takes to fly that dinky heap of tin.” (Lily Casey Smith to a flight instructor who poo-poohed her when she wanted to take flying lessons from him)

Half Broke Horses is filled with great lines like this, some that characterize Lily, as the one above, and others that characterize the land and the varmints who called it home:

"As I sat by my little fire at night, the coyotes howled just like they always had, and the huge moon turned the desert silver."

"Arizona, with its wide open spaces and no one peering over your shoulder, had always been a haven for folks who didn’t like the law or other busybodies to know what they were up to."

I didn’t think this was as compelling as The Glass Castle, but I appreciated Walls’s ability to paint the Arizona landscape, and sear me with the desert suns’ heat, and show me a woman with sand, whose grit ensured her survival in an unforgiving place.

Half Broke Horses A True-Life Novel

Reviews