In Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls, I found a character full of life, defying hardship, and through it all maintaining a wonderful sense of humor. Lily Casey Smith had grit, a person who could rise above hard times. The novel takes place in the first half of the twentieth century.

This novel actually started out as a biography about the author’s grandmother. At the time of writing the author didn’t think of the book as fiction, but since she took liberties with quotations and missing details, she decided that it should be a novel.

The story begins when Lily is ten years old, her brother Buster is nine, and sister Helen seven. Her mother, a lady even to ridiculous ends, faces many hardships trying to keep up her self-image at their 160-acre homestead in West Texas. Her father had a bad limp and distorted speech from being kicked by a horse as a boy. By age 6, Lily was helping her dad break horses that he trained to become carriage horses. Because his speech was hard to understand, she was often a go-between him and the ranch hands or in other situations that required clarification.

When Lily turned thirteen she went to boarding school at Loretto Academy of Our Lady of the Light in Santa Fe. To her, school was a glorious vacation. She could sleep in until 6:00 and didn’t even have to do chores before school! She loved school and was a bright student. Sadly, her father couldn’t afford tuition so she had to return home.

At the age of fifteen, Lily passed a test to become an itinerant replacement teacher in Red Lake, Arizona. She rode horseback, alone, 500 miles to her teaching post in Arizona. She taught in the one-room school for four years, but had not yet finished high school.

Lily’s story continues in Chicago where she worked days and went to school in the evenings to earn her high school diploma. She had an unfortunate marriage that ended in annulment. Lily attended the Arizona state teachers’ college in Flagstaff and eventually married again. Lily and her husband Jim had two children and managed a large ranch in Arizona.

I loved this story of bravery in the face of defeat, of perseverance in tough times, and the wisdom to follow her father’s advice: “learn how to fall” and “find your purpose.”