Book Review: Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Rating: B/ I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such mixed feelings about a character as I had about  the tough-as-nails protagonist of Walls’ biographical novel of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. As for this book’s story, it’s pretty much more of the same; don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean ‘more of the same’ as a bad thing necessarily. Anyone who has read a book by Jeannette Walls knows she tells a good and compelling yarn, whether it be mostly true (as is the case with her memoir of her neglectful upbringing, The Glass Castle) or straight-up fiction (like her also-delightful novel, The Silver Star,) but if you’ve read her other two books and expect something drastically different with this one, you would be wrong. Well, they say ‘write what you know…’ Apparently Walls knows a lot about childhoods that curl the toes of anyone with any protective instinct toward children whatsoever. As for her family history, it’s astonishing that any of the Walls children made it to adulthood.