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I listened to this book on audio and really enjoyed it. Walls wrote this book after she had published The Glass Castle. Half Broke Horses is told from Walls' grandmother, Lily's, first person perspective. Lily is a fascinating person who led a dynamic life, almost all of which that Walls captures in the book is true. However, Walls had to fill in some gaps along the way, which is why she choose to label the book as fiction. At the end of the book on audio, Walls goes into detail about how she ch
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Entertaining - both a memoir and great stories of a feisty woman growing up in the West during the depression.
This doesn't match up to The Glass Castle, but understandably so, as this is a retelling of an imagined life - that of Walls's grandmother - rather than a lived experience. Still, Lily Casey Smith's life is itself a pretty fascinating one - pioneer woman-meets-cowgirl-meets-aspiring teacher - and it was engaging enough. I just felt that each chapter read a bit like a discrete episode, and the entire fabric of Lily Casey Smith's life doesn't feel quite as rich as it could have been.
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Once again, I was totally enthralled by Walls's writing. She clearly is a truly gifted writer. I'm fascinated by the women of her family, at once all intelligent, independent, strong of will and spirit women who never seemed to fit in any "box".
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Jeannette Wall's fictional account of her grandmother and grandfather's lives in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Sep 05, 2009
Courtney
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