Thursday, August 7, 2014

Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls

Walls took all of the stories she could find about her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, and cobbled together a narrative that is no more than the sum of its parts.  Lily was quite a character, but she never really comes to life.  Perhaps her granddaughter wasn't the right person to understand how a woman of her time (she was born in 1901 in West Texas) came to be a mustang breaker, horse racer, schoolteacher, pilot, rancher, driver, college graduate, wife and mother of two.  Lily's daughter Rosemary was Lily's sidekick in a number of her adventures, but Rosemary and Lily never really seemed to understand each other either.

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