Review: Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls

After Glass Castles, one of the most absorbing and well-written books I have ever read, I couldn't wait to hear more from Jeannette Walls. I was thrilled to see that she had published a prequel to Castle, and immediately requested it from the library. Once again, I was completely captivated. Not only was the novel, a work of historical fiction because Walls' grandmother passed away when Walls was eight, interesting in its own right, but knowing what the future would bring had me even more engaged, looking for clues to what was to bring on the craziness and misery that was to follow in the next generation.

In Half Broke Horses, Walls tells the story of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, an incredibly ingenius woman from birth. The story begins with Lily saving herself and her siblings from a flash flood by pulling them into a tree at the last minute; she kept the three of them alive by making sure everyone stayed awake all night, until the waters receded and they could slog their way home. She managed the family ranch and the employees from age eleven on, because her father had a speech impediment that prevented him from communicating with the ranch hands and buyers. At a time when women were still supposed to be subservient, throughout her life she worked constantly and proudly, beating men in horseracing and poker, selling beer out of her kitchen during prohibition, and learning first to drive and then to fly. Her talent of breaking wild horses is a theme that runs through the book.

As impressive as Lily was, I could also see where some of the family's later misfortune came from. Lily was changed dramatically by her discovery that her first husband was actually a con artist with another family, and later by the suicide of her pregnant sister. She became intolerant of any sentimentality, and hardened towards others, never fully trusting another person again. Her second marriage was a partnership rather than a love affair and, because she blamed her sister's death on a combination of a lack of inner strength and emotional weakness brought on by all the favor she received because of her beauty, her children were raised with an eye towards teaching them to withstand hardship. Her daughter, who went on to become Walls' mother, was a replica of her aunt, and was particularly affected by her mother's lack of emotional attention and understanding. This made an obvious, and sad, correlation to her later behavior - as that of wild horse half broken, just as Lily herself had been half-broken by the emotional tragedy of her early life.

While Walls states at the end of the novel that she cannot call it a biography, she was able to verify many of the events and stories that had been passed down through the generations through local media and oral histories. Thus, though the work is technically a type of historical fiction due to conversations and emotional insights that could not be verified, its flavor is definitely that of a well-crafted biography. The story of her tough-as-nails grandmother is just as interesting as that of her parents, in its own right as well as in an anticipating-a-trainwreck kind fo way.

Rating: five of five stars. A must for Glass Castle readers, and anyone interested in biographical fiction.