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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416586289
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, The Glass Castle, recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lily's plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and starts because of her parents' penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby's crib.) Lily is a spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble drudgery in several states—New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois—but hers is one of those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an audience. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Marie Arana It's a rare family memoir that packs all the power of a Charles Dickens novel. The adults must be as cruel as they are foolish, the children as resourceful as they are wise. Yet the characters in Jeannette Walls's best-selling 2005 memoir, "The Glass Castle," possessed all those Dickensian qualities. Walls's father, Rex, was a con man and an alcoholic; her mother, Rose Mary, unhinged and immature; together they made for disastrous parents, and the misery they inflicted was dire. So it's no surprise that the story of this coal-town family, in all its glorious dysfunction, sold 2.5 million copies. Overseas, it was read in 25 languages. The readers who got to know Rex and Rose Mary were legion, and they closed "The Glass Castle" wanting to know more. But the sequel that Walls now offers is not a memoir at all. Written from the point of view of her gritty West Texan grandmother, "Half Broke Horses" is described as a "True-Life Novel," and the story it tells takes place not within the author's lifetime, but half a century before she was born. The heroine and narrator is Lily Casey Smith, the spunky daughter of an ex-convict and a pious, God-fearing mother. Born in 1901 in a dugout, "more or less a big hole on the side of the riverbank," Lily grows up with a floor that runs to mud during the rainy season and a ceiling that drops the occasional snake or scorpion. Her father believes in a Theory of Purpose; her mother believes in the power of prayer. In truth, they agree on very little, aside from the principle that bathrooms inside houses are downright disgusting. By 5, Lily is learning to train her father's horses. At 6, she's in charge of breaking them in. A veteran of ill winds and droughts, she learns to love that hard, yellow land, even though the land doesn't appear to love her much in return. When a tornado smashes a windmill into the family abode, her father wails, "If I owned hell and west Texas, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell." But Lily is an indomitable young woman. By 12, she is running the ranch, mucking out the barns, helping to geld the horses, giving the ranch hands all the orders. At 15, she proves so headstrong that she heads out on horseback to make a new life as an itinerant teacher, 500 miles away on the Arizona frontier. As it turns out, everywhere she goes Lily strikes people as being bullheaded. When she is fired from one too many schoolrooms, she heads for Chicago just as World War I comes to a close, but in the flood of returning soldiers, she's unable to find a job. She works as a housemaid for rich people she finds unintelligent, ends up irritating them, floats around the big city with a new friend she will lose, and ends up marrying a traveling salesman. But actually the "crumb-bun" isn't traveling at all, only living across town with another wife and children. So it goes. Lily runs up against hardships and survives them, steeling her resolve to be true to herself and speak her mind. Homesick for the West, she returns to Arizona and becomes known as "the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County." Along the way she meets a lapsed Mormon, makes it clear she won't put up with any funny polygamy business, then asks for his hand in marriage. With Jim Smith at her side, Lily will go on to run liquor during the Prohibition, earn a college degree, learn to fly an airplane, survive the Great Depression and run a 100,000-acre ranch just north of the Juniper Mountains. Most important, she will give birth to the wild, irrepressible Rosemary, who, in turn, will grow up to marry the adorable rake Rex and give birth to four more indomitable children who will face their own travails in the coal hills of West Virginia. Off they will go like a herd of half-broke horses unfit for corral or the open range. Let me take a cue from Lily Casey Smith and speak plainly here: This book is no "Glass Castle." Beyond what we already know about the lives of Rex and Rosemary when we start these pages, there is little sparkle or narrative drive. Too often the prose is flat and unimaginative. There's no one to love, certainly not Lily. And not until Rex appears on Page 248 (a handful of pages before the end), does the dialogue pick up, the author's voice kick into a nice trot and the prose shine. "Half Broke Horses" may be a commendable chronicle of an admirably tough woman on America's western frontier, but a well-crafted work of fiction it is not, and it cannot compare to classic "true-life novels" like Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird," Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" or Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations." For a great many readers of this book, it probably won't matter. It will be enough to come upon a few sentences such as these and understand how Rosemary learned to tolerate her own slovenliness: "Levi's we didn't wash at all. . . . We wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil -- and then we wore them some more. . . . When [they] 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." It's useful information if you're curious about Jeannette Walls's mother. But the novel itself is too tied to "The Glass Castle" to function well on its own. Every page, every chapter, seems to work only as a prolegomenon to the memoir. That's no way to read a work of fiction. As Rex says to Lily in the last pages of this book, "The problem with being attached to an anchor is it's damned hard to fly."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"Lily Casey Smith is one astonishing woman...a half-broke horse herself who's clearly passed on her best traits to her granddaughter. Told in a natural, offhand voice that is utterly enthralling, this is essential reading for anyone who loves good fiction." -- Library Journal

"Walls [is] ... a pretty doggone good storyteller."-- Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Half Broke Horses [is] the tale of yet another free-spirited wisecracking relative, her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Think a rifle-toting, horse-breaking Annie Oakley in a biplane."-- Craig Wilson, USA Today

Customer Reviews

Everything Good is Worth Waiting For!
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.

Just Read It ....
This is not as good as her previous book, "The Glass Castles," which I could not put down. This book is a "true-life novel" based on Walls' grandmother, her mother's mother. And it is a wonderful book. Lily Casey Smith was no lily-livered woman who fainted at the slightest urge (Lily's mom did do that on occasion). Lily was the oldest child in her family and by the age of 6 she was helping her father break in horses, a no easy feat for a child, let alone a grown man. Lily was a woman in every sense of the word ... practical, no-nonsense, hard-working and honest. Even though Walls is writing a novel based on her grandmother's life, Walls' words bring the woman to life in every word of the page.

This is a different writing style from Walls' memoir, where it was a thoughtful prose designed to get the reader to read more into a childhood that was hard and filled with parents who couldn't stay put in one place nor could they raise their children. The children raised themselves. In this book, Lily was written to be a tough woman who had faced desperate times ... such as hiding bootleg liquor underneath her son's crib. She did what she could to make ends meet. Even her marriage to Big Jim was practical though I sense through Walls' writing that there was love and mutual respect between the two. Lily is the example of feminism in its best ... she pulled no punches into doing anything. She didn't shy away from speaking her mind even though it did cost her job twice.

Walls has a talent where people and their distant stories just come to life. For awhile there, I was so interested in this novel that I kept forgetting that parts of it is made up since Walls admitted that she never talked with her grandmother so she was filling in the blanks. Lily Casey Smith comes alive in this book and what a wonderful tribute to a woman who is part of Jeannette Walls' heritage. What a rich heritage that is too.

7/25/09

unforgettable
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.