collected
Fiction · Novel · Historical Fiction · Literary Fiction
About 5 h 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 12 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Lily Casey Smith grows up working livestock on a west Texas ranch in the early twentieth century, then rides alone across New Mexico at fifteen to take a teaching job. Her life takes her to Chicago and back to Arizona, where she and her husband Jim raise two children and struggle to keep a cattle ranch going through drought and the Great Depression. Teaching, poker and bootleg liquor help pay the bills.
Her granddaughter Jeannette Walls reconstructs the family stories as a biographical novel in Lily’s blunt first-person voice. Brief, chronological episodes carry a lifetime of work and setbacks, so the narrative reads as a succession of remembered incidents.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Highly regarded
No, the prose is conversational and direct, and brief episodes move briskly through Lily’s life in chronological order. The reading effort comes more from the emotional weight of her setbacks than from complicated language or structure.
It is a biographical novel: Jeannette Walls reconstructs her grandmother Lily Casey Smith’s life from family stories, telling it in Lily’s blunt first-person voice.
It unfolds as a succession of brief, remembered incidents rather than one sustained plot. The episodes follow Lily chronologically through ranch work, teaching, family life and the struggle to keep a cattle ranch going.
No, the tone is warm, hopeful and reflective, though Lily’s life includes emotionally intense setbacks. Drought, the Great Depression and the demands of supporting a family give the story its struggles.
288 pages in the Scribner 2010 paperback edition.
Scribner · 2010 · Paperback. ISBN 9781416586296.
About 5 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 288-page Scribner edition. Dense books can take longer.
Jeannette Walls is an American writer and journalist whose work brings a reporter’s directness to family history. After beginning her career at a Brooklyn newspaper and later working as a gossip columnist, she became widely known for The Glass Castle, a memoir of a nomadic childhood marked by poverty, danger, and her father’s alcoholism. Half Broke Horses, which she called a “true-life novel,” turns to the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, and the demands of work and survival in the American West. Across both books, Walls favors clear, conversational, character-centered storytelling, with particular attention to resourcefulness within unstable families.
