Monday, August 02, 2010

Half Broke Horses by Jeanette Walls


Our August book club selection was this fictionalization of the biography of Jeanette Walls' maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. I am a big fan of Walls' memoir The Glass Castle, and for readers who wondered, as I did, how her parents could have ever become such risk-takers, this novel, at least, fills in the details on her mother's side. Rose Mary, Jeanette's mother, was raised by a renegade horse-breaker, school teacher, no-nonsense ranch wife. We listened to this book on audio tape driving home from Vermont and Jeanette Wall's own reading made it even more enjoyable. I'm looking forward to talking about the book with my daughter who is about to finish The Glass Castle as part of her summer reading for Honor English 11.

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