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Loading... Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel (original 2009; edition 2009)by Jeannette Walls
Work detailsHalf Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (2009)
I picked up this book, Half Broke Horses, while vacationing during spring break. For me, it was a perfect beach read and I zipped through it. I had really liked The Glass Castle, also by Jeannette Walls, some time back (and for some reason I didn't discuss it here?),so no surprise that I liked this also. The author terms this book a "true-life novel", which means that it is loosely based on the life of her grandmother. (  ) ValerieAndBooks | Apr 11, 2013 |  I liked this book much more than [b:The Glass Castle|7445|The Glass Castle|Jeannette Walls|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165613865s/7445.jpg|2944133]. For one thing, it covers more of the narrator's life than just her childhood and goes into "grandmotherhood." There is also much more strength of character in this novel. The narrator, Lily, has a lot of gumption and she gets beyond her father's hairbrained schemes and has a life of her own. Certainly you can see how this book ties into The Glass Castle, though, because Rex is certainly the crazy father in the Castle. There's more variety in the escapades in this book, too, and even though bad things happen just as something good happens, how the bad happens is varied (weather, someone else, a mistake, luck, etc) and not the same mistake again and again. The pace is good, and the writing pithy. A good audiobook, too. ( ) LDVoorberg | Apr 7, 2013 | In this "true life novel", Jeannette Walls reconstructs the life of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, in the form of a first person narrative. Lily, born in 1900, is a pistol. Carries one, too. Lily is a tough-as-nails gal with a lust for life. She endures numerous setbacks but bounces back from each one with a resilience that ought to give pause to our current generation of crybabies. Yeah, the current economic climate is tough, but the Lily's generation has it a lot tougher. Rancher, pilot, and schoolmarm, she takes on life with an admirable authority. Walls clearly admires her subject, but manages to poke some straight-faced fun at her as well. For example, Lily's tendency to invite strangers into her house to show off her new indoor plumbing. Or her sense of pride in her new set of dentures that compels her to pull them out of her mouth and show them to people. (  ) EricKibler | Apr 6, 2013 | This is a good book on it's own, but if you've read The Glass Castle, it's especially fascinating to meet Jeannette Walls's grandmother and mother, and to watch the growing clash between these two, strong-willed but very different characters. (  ) JillKB | Apr 4, 2013 | loved her last book!  pam.enser | Apr 1, 2013 |
 The pert style of “Half Broke Horses” is much more repetitive and grating than the more spontaneous-sounding voice Ms. Walls used to describe her own life. But the author comes from a family that knew how to lure horses using grain, not rope. And she has inherited a version of that skill. So she has managed to make her second book almost as inviting as her first, even though its upright heroine is never as startling as Ms. Walls’s parents were.
References to this work on external resources.
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A true-life novel about Lily Casey Smith (the author's grandmother) who at age six helped her father break horses, at age fifteen left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother runs a vast ranch in Arizona where she survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy--but despite a life of hardscrabble drudgery still remains a woman of indomitable spirit.… (more)
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