Half Broke Horses - Brossura

‘Based on the true life of the author’s maternal gran, it focuses on a woman who leaves home at fifteen to become a cowgirl and horse trainer’
List 22/10
‘Half Broke Horses has immense power and readability...What Half Broke Horses does with aplomb is to track the birth of a nation: the conjuring of modern America from a scorched, dusty wasteland; the unstoppable encroachment of what might be civilisation but is probably just commercialism. Every time Lily travels she sees evidence of change. Railroads and skyscrapers appear as if from nowhere. Suspicion of authority grows. The moment when Lily is slapped back by a pupil she has herself slapped for his insolence is a critical one’
The Times 21/11
‘A worthy insight into the life of a remarkable woman’ Herald 19/12

Lily Casey Smith is a sassy, straight-talking heroine for whom saving lives, taming wild horses and beating ranch hands at poker are all in a day's work. Born in 1901, in a dirt house in the rolling gritty grassland of Texas, at age six she is helping her father break horses. At fifteen she leaves home to teach in a town five hundred miles away, riding there on her pony, all alone. Lily handles everything that life throws at her - flash floods and tornadoes, the Great Depression, the most heartbreaking personal tragedy - with immense courage and determination and a wide smile.
The story of Lily's life has been passed down from one generation of her family to another. Now, in the words of her granddaughter Jeannette Walls, who draws on her own vivid imagination and compelling narrative powers, Lily's indomitable passion and spirit will shine through to readers everywhere, in this extraordinary true-life novel.