Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel Author: Jeannette Walls | Language: English | ISBN:
B002PMVQCW | Format: EPUB
Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel Description
Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle was "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly). Now she brings us the story of her grandmother -- told in a voice so authentic and compelling that the book is destined to become an instant classic. "
Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane, and, with her husband, ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in
The Glass Castle.
Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold.
Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen's
Out of Africa or Beryl Markham's
West with the Night. It will transfix readers everywhere.
- File Size: 2290 KB
- Print Length: 305 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1416586296
- Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (October 6, 2009)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B002PMVQCW
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,519 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Biographical - #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction > Biographical - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Biographical
- #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Biographical - #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction > Biographical - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Biographical
Jeannette Walls new book "Half Broke Horses" is an enthralling, hard to put down book, written by a brilliant writer. But the book suffers from that most modern of flaws, an inability and actually even a positive embargo on emotions and consequent moral judgments or shadings.
"Half Broke Horses" with Lily, its heroine, a real life pioneer woman, could be the next "I Remember Mama" or "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn". But I'm sure Walls and all other modern writers would rather die than be compared to either of those, which would surely be regarded by modern critics as overly sentimental.
So, what we're left with is a book that is a great yarn, with fascinating details about the American Southwest at the turn of the century, told by an immensely talented and skilled writer, that lacks one thing: the pulse of human feeling. There's plenty of sweat, and that makes the characters very admirable, but no blood, and that makes them a little dry and depressing. Events that would scar any normal human heart happen without even drawing a drop of blood or tears or sighs.
And yet the events of her life show that Lily did many things that required courage, strength, love, and dedication, and that heartbreak touched her life more than once. But not only does the author not dwell upon Lily's feelings and the emotions that must have kept her going or threatened to sink her, they are never mentioned. The result is the book's tone becomes like listening to someone suffering from low level depression drone on about their life. Arid, dry, a downer.
The author seems to admire Lily's lack of feeling, as if the best human beings can aspire to is to ignore their emotions. And that may be how Lily got through her daunting and difficult life.
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