Featured Giveaway: Jeannette Walls's Half Broke Horses
By Barbara Hoffert -- Library Journal, 05/21/2009
Jeannette Walls's new work, Half Broke Horses (Scribner), is subtitled A True-Life Novel, and that seems about right. After the coruscating truths of her memoir, The Glass Castle, she's chosen to retell her grandmother's life "with the storyteller's liberties, ... [so] the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel," as Walls says in the afterword. And what a story.
It's not just that Lily Casey Smith knew how to break horses by age six, trotted all over the Southwest on her pony to various teaching posts, and raised two children with her husband while running a gas station, then running a ranch, and sometimes running hooch to make ends meet. It's the voice: intimate, honest, offhand, a real storyteller's voice flowing like a sweet river in the desert after a cloudburst. I know because I'm reading the galley now. Giveaways are available only at BEA's Saturday Book and Author Breakfast, so get a ticket if you haven't done so—or crash the party. After all, the bold and daring Lily was a half-broke horse herself. Click here for our complete BEA galley giveaway guide.
