Half Broke Horses: Wild and free

Resolute Lily Casey Smith (1901-68) rules the unbridled West in “Half Broke Horses,” a horse lover’s novel by Jeannette Walls based on the true-life travels of her grandmother, a pioneering American.

Publisher Simon & Schuster says the 272-page book, which drops today in bookstores nationwide, is a grown-up version of “Little House on the Prairie” — and that’s a fitting, if tame, assessment.

“Half Broke Horses” is the anticipated prequel to 2005’s best-selling “The Glass Castle” memoir about Walls’ unorthodox journey as a child through poverty and adventure to something like redemption on the other side.

“Half Broke Horses,” likewise, is wild and free with its straightforward language, proving an easy and engaging weekend read. It leaves an impression too for its high value of hard work, nurturing nature and perpetual education as survival.

Walls dedicated it to “all teachers” — among them her mother and grandmother.

Never following the rules and always reinventing herself, the book’s heroine, the unintentionally stylish Lily, is a cross between daring Amelia Earhart, nonconformist Janis Joplin, cultured Cate Blanchett — that’s who Walls said she could see playing her grandmother in a movie — and unruly Annie Oakley.

Or maybe Lily defies comparison as she unflinchingly rounds up and rides half-wild horses as deftly as she imparts a sense of independent thought to a classroom of children in a close-minded town, saves her little brother — and herself — in a flash flood by clutching the branches of a cottonwood tree or, yes, soars in a plane, as a woman, over the cracked desert.

“I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn’t half bad to be in a place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that,” writes Walls.

The 49-year-old journalist and best-selling author who lives on a farm near the town of Culpeper recently wrote her late grandmother’s rousing story using her grandmother’s no-nonsense voice and after interviewing her mother, Rose Mary, an artist, every day for an hour for an entire year.

Beyond that, Walls said in a recent interview at the Star-Exponent, “I just sort of filled in the gaps with things I didn’t know.”

As for “The Glass Castle,” it’s sold 2.5 million copies in the U.S., is available in 25 languages and is under consideration as a movie, facts she rattled off, adding, with a laugh, “It’s really weird. It’s a big hit in Germany. It’s been on the bestsellers’ list in Canada, in the top 10, since it came out. Canadians love it.”

Get ready to love “Half Broke Horses,” a testament to the power of oral history that includes geographic descriptions that are so true, beautiful, dreamlike and detailed it’s mind-boggling.
Walls, in the author’s note, said she heard her grandmother’s stories all her life from her own mother, who heard them over and over again from her mother, Lily.

Rose Mary “has an astonishing recall for details about her mother and father,” says Walls, “as well as an amazing knowledge of the history and geology of Arizona.”

Combine with that Lily’s educated, tough-as-nails voice as interpreted by her 21st century descendant, a professional writer and a strong female in her own right, and “Half Broke Horses” nearly pops off the page like some sort of truth tale that doesn’t leave out the tough parts.

In this passage, a young skeptical Lily recounts her mother’s religious inclinations as the family encounters yet another flood in their dugout home, basically a pit in the ground, where she was born along a river in Texas:

“She kept saying that the flood was God’s will and we had to submit to it. But I didn’t see things that way. Submitting seemed a lot to me like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail — the gumption to try to save ourselves — isn’t that what he wanted us to do?”

And this of her surroundings:

“It was hard country. The ground was like rock — save for when a flood turned everything to mud — the animals were bony and tough, and even the plants were prickly and sparse, though from time to time the thunderstorms brought out startling bursts of wildflowers.”

Funny how people can look like where they live.

Attitudes imitate an unpredictable environment, and ranch living shapes values in “Half Broke Horses,” a tale of making the most of what one has that is worth a full read.
Walls encourages others to take a look back from whence they came.

“Everybody should study their ancestry,” she said, “because you see these patterns emerge. Nonfiction holds the answers to so many questions. And you see, oh my gosh, no wonder I’m that way.”

Walls sees herself more in her grandmother than her mother, that’s for sure.

“I am very different from mom, or motivated by different things — she loves art and harmony. But like I said, I’m so much like Lily and just wanted to better and improve my lot,” Walls said. “It made a lot of sense to me once I wrote the book.”

Interested?
Buy the book: Purchase Jeannette Walls’ “Half Broke Horses” today through Oct. 26 and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to The Culpeper Literacy Council, a charity close to the author’s heart. The book, in hardcover with photos, published by Simon & Schuster, sells for $26; order at cornershelfbookstore.com or by calling (540) 825-4411.

Upcoming in the Star-Exponent: Walls hosts a “Half Broke Horses” benefit this spring in support of the Literacy Council at Germanna Community College’s Daniel Technology Center in Culpeper.