Half Broke Horses: a True Life Novelby Jeannette Walls
Scribner, 2009. 272 pgs. Fiction/Nonfiction
Not quite busted broncs do indeed fill the pages of Walls' first-person retelling of her grandmother's life story, some equine, many human. Lily Casey Smith grew up in the still-quite-wild West in a dugout that dripped mud and spiders from the ceiling. Breaking horses at age six, she soon served as de facto foreman of her father's ranch since he had a speech impediment caused by a brain injury and her mother was more the retiring (read: shrinking violet) type. When she was fifteen she left home to teach school. When returning soldiers took all the teaching jobs she went to Chicago, met and married a "crumb bum" who was already married to someone else. Coming back home she married Big Jim Smith, one of fifty-two of Lot Smith's sons by eight wives and they raised two children, Little Jim and Rosemary, who is the Rose Mary of Walls' The Glass Castle. Lily is a poker-playing, bootlegging, bronc-busting schoolmarm who takes what comes and goes on. An authentic voice of the high desert country.
LW
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