Half Broke Horses - Jeannette Walls

Half Broke Horses - Jeannette Walls (2009)

In this novel Jeannette Walls recreates the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Brought up poor, who by age six is helping her father out breaking horses. At fifteen, she gets her first job teaching, which takes her a month to get to riding on her horse alone. After meeting and marrying her husband Big Jim, she helps him to run a ranch. She raises two children, learns to drive a car and fly a plane, earns her teaching degree and teaches many different students.

Jeannette Walls has chosen to call this book a novel, as her grandmother died when she was 8, and most of the stories she has heard are from her mother. I think I preferred this book to The Glass Castle , which I read last week. Something in it seemed more honest to me, it's sense of time and place, the strong characters who were our grandparents, their resourcefulness, their lack of vanity and their perseverance. Instead I think we are raising a generation full of botox Barbies who measure every ones value by their appearance.

A 4/5 for this one, I enjoyed it's sense of the frontier, at a time of great change.