Half-broke Horses: A True Life Novel, By Jeannette Walls
(Reviewed by Jane)

We featured Jeanette Walls’ book “The Glass Castle” in our book club about a year ago. That book was a memoir about her life with her troubled parents.  So, this book is sort of a pre-quel.

If you read “The Glass Castle”, you’ll be interested to see the childhood of Jeannette’s dysfunctional mother, Rosemary.  The writing style of “Half-Broke Horses” is quite different from “The Glass Castle”, since she wrote this book in her grandmother’s voice. I actually read them out of order; in other words I read “Half-Broke” before “Glass Castle”, so if you haven’t read either one, start with this one.  

“Half Broke Horses” is the novelized version of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith’s life, spent mostly on a ranch in Texas.   She was kind of the typical, strong, pioneer type of women you would expect to find in the southwest, in the early 1900s.  Born in 1901, she spent her childhood helping her dad break horses on heir ranch. … (more…)