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Meet Lily Casey Smith. Born and raised in the frontier of America in Texas, this gal is no spring chicken. By the age of 5, she began breaking wild horses. At 15, she became a schoolteacher. Also on her résumé are racehorse jockey, bootlegger and airplane pilot. She has survived everything from flash floods and tornadoes to city-slicking con artists and homelessness. This remarkable woman has so much inner strength that when the world knocks her down, she ricochets right back up.
Half Broke Horses is an extraordinary tale by Jeannette Walls, the granddaughter of Lily Casey Smith. The stories chronicled in this book are mostly oral history. It is more of a commemorative novel than a slice of history, Walls claims. Written in first-person narrative, the naturalistic voice and sharp humor reveals someone who was undeniably real.
Lily, born in 1901, was raised in a homestead in west Texas. Lily’s father, Jim Smith, is a convicted murderer (supposedly on trumped-up charges) and a “tough-as-nuts” rancher. On the other hand, her mother is, as Lily describes, a useless corseted prissy who lounges in the house while others work. This leaves young Lily with many responsibilities. She is in charge of selling the eggs, hiring and firing workers, and breaking wild horses to accept riders. Her no-fuss personality throughout it all is loveable and inspiring.
At the age of 13, she began her schooling at Sisters of Loretto Academy, where she grew to love learning. Her education is cut short after a year when her father decides to splurge her tuition on imported Great Danes. But as Lily views it, when one door closes in life, another one opens. Soon, she finds a job as a teacher in Arizona and moves out to the American Southwest.
Like tumbleweed, Lily travels from town to town, adopting a variety of different roles — maid, wife and mother, schoolmarm and poker player. As she searches for her purpose in life, Lily makes the best of the cards she has been dealt. Her astounding vitality and freedom of spirit keeps her moving ever forward in the story while her biting humor never fails to entertain the reader. She is like the western version of Scarlett O’Hara with lots of fiddle-dee-dee and a strong-hearted optimism.
Fans of Walls’s Glass Castle, a New York Times best-seller, will relish every word of Half Broke Horses. From beginning to end, her charismatic story is a testament to life itself and a memoir of a lost time in American history.
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