Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I motored through this well-written, tell-it-like-it-was memoirs ("true novel") of Jeannette Walls' maternal grandmother. I am not quite sure why I picked it up, except that I was in a compulsive reading state (allergies, fed up with FB), since my experience reading the memoir of Walls' own childhood, "Glass Castle" was the sort where I felt triggered and zoned-out after reading it.
Then I remembered how Walls had held her maternal grandmother up as the one safe and nurturing adult in her childhood. This was that story.
Lily Casey grew up on a Texas ranch in the early 1900s-- she was her father's 'right hand' in many ways, and helped him with breaking horses for his carriage horse business. She was an all-round hard-working rancher as a child, and also had an active brilliant intelligence that helped her get ahead in the "3 Rs" and have a recognition early-on that she didn't have to be reliant upon an early marriage (as her mother said) to have a good life. She went about having an adventuresome, passionate, active, fun-loving time from the time she left home to be a school teacher in some far-off, remote place at age 15 through her eventual marriage to a man 20 years her senior until her years as the grandmother that Jeannette Walls looked up to.
One of the book cover reviewers suggested that this book was a Laura Ingall Wilders type of story, but for adults. I would agree with that, and how I loved that author's family adventure stories when I was a child.
I think you will enjoy this book as well if you were moved by The Glass Castle.
Jeanette Walls on Oprah:
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HOW BEING READ ALOUD TO SHAPED MY LIFE
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