Kepkanation

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This follow-up to Jeannette Walls’s popular autobiography, The Glass Castle, moves backward in time and adopts a creative tack in telling the story of Walls’s grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Walls begins with Lily’s childhood, working on a dusty ranch in west Texas — but that’s not the creative part. What’s interesting in the form of this book is that the entire story is told in the first person, from the view of Walls’s long-dead grandmother (hence the book’s dual classification by Walls as fiction and non-fiction).



The book follows the form of Walls’s earlier book, too, in that the chapters are often very short and seem to impart large lessons with small (but often thrilling) examples. Through a number of quick chapters, readers see Lily age from a plucky 10 year old with the wherewithal to save her siblings from a flash flood to a practical pre-teen in charge of all hiring on the family ranch. Lily progresses rapidly through boarding school, her first teaching jobs, her first time away from home, her first romance, and before a reader knows it, half the book is gone and an indelible image of Lily Casey has formed in your mind: tough-talking and living, rambunctious but never without purpose, wild but not free-spirited, selfish but somehow, also, always looking out for her family.



This book needs an introduction: namely, it needs the reader to have torn through The Glass Castle with interest and abandon. No, you don’t need to know everything that happens in that book to understand the story of this book — the people are introduced independently, and the story starts long before Jeannette Walls’s earlier autobiography — but you will need to have read The Glass Castle in order to understand the suspense the author embeds in the second half of the book. Once Lily’s children are introduced, the tension that exists between mother and daughter — Rose Mary Smith Walls — is much less interesting if the reader doesn’t understand that all of Lily’s fears about Rose Mary come true. In fact, if I hadn’t read The Glass Castle first, Lily might have seemed even crueler — and I’d be interested to hear if others had this reaction, or if it’s a trick of the light, so to speak. Does Lily’s abusive desperation to keep her daughter grounded seem even worse if you don’t know how spectacularly wrong Rose Mary’s life went? Is that the point?



Walls’s portrait is at once tender and rough. She paints her grandmother as a nearly merciless business woman and an often cold-hearted mother, but she goes to great lengths to show (and to understand) the roots of her distance. The final chapter — written by Walls in the voice of her grandmother about Walls as a baby — goes a long way to explaining what may have been the driving force for this project. How could a woman who Jeannette Walls had loved, feared, and been told by multiple sources that she resembled have been both such a force for good and bad? What made Lily Casey Smith tick?



The answer, or at least a version of the answer, lies here. It’s a quick, interesting read, as much an exercise in family history revelation as story-telling.



View all my reviews