Half Broke HorsesA True-life Novel
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Avg: 2.5 (6 ratings)
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Audiobook Download Information
- Edition:
- Unabridged (Audioworks)
- Length:
- 7 hours, 55 minutes
- File Size:
- 217 MB (8 files)
- Published:
- October 2009
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Review by Jami Attenberg, eMusic
Jeannette Walls's moving first book, the memoir The Glass Castle, depicted an early life of turmoil: her alcoholic father and self-involved mother raised Walls and her three siblings in an unstable, poverty-stricken environment. Through all of it, Walls's voice was the calm in the storm. In her new book, Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, again the drama is high, but the voice holding the book steady this time is a fictionalized version of Walls's maternal grandmother, Lila Casey Smith, an adventurous Western woman — who just happens to kick some serious ass.
Born in 1901 in drought-plagued west Texas, Lily starts learning to train horses at the age of five while living in a shack with a dirt floor. She quickly becomes a survivor of things natural, like scorpions, snakes, and tornados. "Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt," says Lily matter-of-factly, after a tornado hits the family home. She also survives emotional challenges, like a marriage to a con man who, who, when he confesses his sins, Lily coolly observes of him, "The bum sounded like he was about to blubber up." Lily takes on whatever comes her way with spirit and verve, and ends up leading an extraordinary life, breaking horses, playing poker, running liquor, flying planes, and, eventually, giving birth to the woman who will become Walls's mother.
Written in a naturalistic style, Half Broke Horses is a simultaneously funny and inspirational portrait of an indomitable woman who was a feminist before the word existed. Walls herself reads the audiobook, lending it a folksy, authentic charm, as if Lily herself were telling us her own amazing story.
Quotes from the Critics
"Walls does her grandmother proud in this historically revealing and triumphant novel of a fearless, progressive woman who will not be corralled....Fact, fiction, either way, every tall-tale episode in Lily's rough-and-tumble life is hugely entertaining and provocative, while Walls prose is as crystal clear and reviving as the water Lily cherishes in the high desert." (starred review) - Booklist
"[I]n an elegant act of literary transubstantiation, Walls gives first person voice to a kinswoman born too soon to participate in today's memoir boom. She also provides further insight into how she herself got to be the tough, tender, fearless writer she is." - Entertainment Weekly
"[T]he 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." - New York Times
"Through the adventures of Lily Casey--mustang breaker, schoolteacher, ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider, bush pilot and mother of two--Walls revisits the adrenaline-charged frontier background that gave her own mother a lifelong taste for vicissitude." - New York Times Book Review
"The portrait Walls seems most charmed by is that of tough, headstrong women who make their own luck with whatever they possess, learning from mistakes along the way....[I]n this case, Walls is the one figuring out what is learned, just as we are each left to make sense of how those who came before us shape who we are now." - Miami Herald
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