Half Broke Horses

The seventh book of the New York Times Ten Best of 2009 is a "true life novel" by Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses. It is, simply put, the story of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who lived a peripatetic life in the American Southwest during the first half of the twentieth century, mostly teaching in one-room schools and working on ranches.

Many of us have listened to stories told by elderly relatives, and some of them are pretty good, and Walls has done a fine job capturing the voice of her grandmother (the story is told in first person). We can almost feel like we're sitting on a porch, hearing the stories told aloud, with a kind of quaint American speech (using mild epithets like referring to her first husband as a "crumb-bum," or euphemizing anger as "that fried my bacon").

And Lily Casey Smith had a fairly interesting life. She began life in West Texas, and the first episode of the book shows how she saved her younger siblings in a flood. She went home and was told that it was her mother's prayers and a guardian angel that saved them. "The way I saw it, I was the one who'd saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel." The family then moves to New Mexico and young Lily learns how to break horses, but after a few years in a convent school, she heads off to Arizona, alone and on horseback, on a 500-mile trip to take a job teaching school. She was fifteen.

Over the course of her life, she will bounce around from school to school (she often butts heads with authorities, such as when she insists on teaching young Mormon girls that there's a world outside of their compound), a time spent in Chicago, where she marries her first husband (who is indeed a crumb-bum) and then ending up back in Arizona, where she marries and with her husband manages a large ranch. Lily is always up for adventure, as she learns to love automobiles and then even takes flying lessons.

Walls clearly has not elaborated too much on her grandmother's life, as there are chapters that aren't as interesting as others. The first half of the book is much more fraught with excitement than the last, when we get a short chapter on how Lily gets dentures. Most of the second half of the book is taken up with the sometimes difficult relationship she has with her daughter, Rosemary (Walls' mother, and the subject of a Walls memoir). But overall the book is a nice, quick read, and would be very appropriate for younger readers. It is written in a very sparse, matter-of-fact style, without a superfluous word, but occasionally this can be very powerful, as the opening sentence of a chapter following a family tragedy: "When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind." It takes a lot of work to create a sentence that simple yet that moving.