Half Broke HorsesA True-life Novel

An inspirational and hard-bitten portrait of a feminist before the word existed
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.