Recent World War II Literary Nonfiction

From the TBR Shelf #22: Half-Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Half-Broke Horses (2009) by Jeannette Walls

Snakes dropping onto your kitchen table, floods destroying your house, tornadoes flattening towns: this was the world of Lily Casey Smith, the writer's grandmother, who was born and raised in the American Southwest during the early 20th century. Walls takes her grandmother as her subject in this, her second, book, after describing her own itinerant and unstable childhood in The Glass Castle. And despite the flatness of the narrative voice at times, Walls's book masterfully offers us a long-vanished world as seen through the eyes of her no-nonsense, determined, intelligent grandmother.