Half broke horses
2009
- fiction
- social life and customs
- nyt:hardcover-fiction=2009-10-25
- fiction, biographical
- texas, fiction
- arizona, fiction
- ranches
- teachers
- families
- married people
The story
It is 1970 in a small town in California. "Bean" Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in Charlotte's family for generations ... An impetuous optimist, Bean soon discovers who her father was, and hears stories about why their mother left Virginia in the first place. Money is tight, and the sisters start babysitting and doing office work for Jerry Maddox, foreman of the mill in town, who bullies his workers, his tenants, his children, and his wife. Liz is whip-smart--an inventor of word games, reader of Edgar Allan Poe, nonconformist. But when school starts in the fall, it's Bean who easily adjusts, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn. And then something happens to Liz in the car with Maddox.
What it’s like
Told in the bright, wry voice of a twelve-year-old who narrates her hard months with an impetuous optimism, this novel moves through a long unsettled summer and fall in 1970s small-town California, then a road trip east toward a crumbling family mansion in Virginia. The mood shifts between brisk, funny and tender early on and steadily darker as money runs short and the adults around the sisters show their cruelty. Its emotional core is the bond between two sisters, one buoyant and one withdrawn, and the slow wearing-down of trust. The intensity is real: a bullying small-town foreman, neglectful parents, and a sexual assault of a fifteen-year-old that is serious and central to the book's second half, though it is not described in graphic detail. There is little violence on the page. It suits a reader who likes a grounded, character-driven novel with a sharp young narrator, someone ready for an honest, sometimes heavy story about resilience, and not a gentle comfort read.
More books like Half broke horses
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved Half broke horsesand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
