Are you reading Half-Broke Horses with me or what? OK I think you are, because many of you have emailed to say you are. So am I. And loving it.
So let’s talk. At first I was a bit skeptical on the premise. A True-Life Novel? Written by Jeannette Walls (whose memoir The Glass Castle I really loved) in her grandmother’s voice?
But by page 9 I was sold. You can’t make up stuff like the fact that she lived in a dugout. Not a house. A dugout. Because timber was so scarce in the part of Texas where Lily was born, her father made their home by shoveling out what was more or less a big hole on the side of the riverbank, using cedar branches as rafters and covering them over with sod. The dugout had one room, a packed earth floor, a wooden door, a waxed-paper window and a cast iron stove. Lily says
“The best thing about living in the dugout was that it was cool in the summer and not too cold in the winter. The worst thing about it was that from time to time, scorpions, lizareds, snakes, gophers, centipedes, and moles wormed their way out of our walls and ceiling. Once in the middle of an Easter dinner, a rattler dropped onto the table.”
I guess if that’s where you’re born, you don’t know any different. We didn’t have cable when I was growing up, and I just assumed everyone got up to manually change the channel and crank the dial on the antenna box to make it turn toward Toronto so I could watch Video Hits at 4:30 on Fridays, and toward Buffalo to catch 90210 on Wednesday nights.
It’s no dugout though. Especially one that gets washed away in a flash flood, leaving Lily and her two siblings and parents homeless.
What do you think so far?
Ok. So I was a bit behind reading this book. But I’m all caught up now!
I kind of loved how through the whole flood and any of the trials and tribulations she faced, that Lily always attributed making through it to herself and her “gumption” rather than fate/God.