Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel

Wow what an amazing story. Lily was an absolute bad a**.

Immediately pulls you in. I very easily fell in love with the grit of the main character. I enjoyed the insight in to Jeannette’s mother and how she was raised.

Another great book by one of my favorite authors! Their story is incredible and inspiring. Highly recommend!

Great book. Read this one before the Glass Castle.

What a fun, delightful read! As you probably already know, the author wrote this "true life" novel about her very own grandmother, Lily Smith. It covers her life from the early 1900s to the 1950s. Her story takes readers to the wild Texas west, 1920s Chicago, and both the ranch life and city life of Arizona. Lily plays many a role. Besides being a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and eventually a grandmother, Lily at some time or another steps into the role of teacher, bus driver, horse racer, horse trainer, maid, gas pumper, rancher, lady pilot, and even a taxi driver. The novel, told from her point of view, tells about her parents, the land, the weather, her pregnant sister, job losses, foreclosures, suicide, and the trials of having a thirteen year old daughter that skinny dips with the ranch hands. And let's not forget her failed first marriage, a story of its own. I had a favorite part or two I just have to mention so everybody can get the gist of this darn good yarn. I especially liked the part in which Lily is teaching in Arizona in a mostly Mormon one room school house and tries to show the young girls under her tuition that "there were other things they could do besides being brood mares dressed in feed sacks." That just goes to show, what kind of woman Lily was. I laughed with absolute glee when she aimed her gun at stalking Uncle Eli and said "you come round here again, you better be wearing your wonder underwear.." This is truly a great book that shouldn't be missed. I recommend it to women everywhere that like to read about other strong women. As Lily would say, "you'll get the lace knocked off your panties!"

As a life long fan of Little House on the Praire I couldn't pass up the opportunity to read a book compared to Little House. The book is everything it promises. I couldn't put it down and had to read it a second time because I enjoyed it so much. I found myself sympathizing with Lily at times and at others laughing out loud at some of her antics and the way she handled situations. Some readers might find some the accounts in this book hard to believe. I wasn't alive during the Great Depression but was raised by parents and family members that lived during that era. I've heard many stories told over and over by these relatives of survival, making the best of bad situations and doing with what you had. I so enjoyed listening to my relatives tell their stories and found Jeanette Wall's book enthralling and similar in many ways. If you are a Little House Fan I would highly recommend this book. I only wish I had read Jeanette Wall's firs book The Glass Castle prior to reading this book but I've now ordered it and can't wait to read it.

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.