Half broke horses

Half Broke Horses is Jeannette Walls's account of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith, told in Lily's voice as a "true-life novel." Raised on a hardscrabble ranch in West Texas, Lily learns to break horses as a child and rides five hundred miles alone at fifteen to take a teaching post in a one-room schoolhouse. The book follows her through a Catholic girls' school, a first marriage cut short, years spent teaching and driving a truck, and a long partnership running a cattle ranch in Arizona with her second husband. Along the way she survives floods, the Depression, and the daily grind of frontier life, working odd jobs from bootlegging to poker to keep her family afloat. It is a prequel of sorts to Walls's memoir The Glass Castle, tracing the resourcefulness and hard edges her own mother inherited.