Jumping Jehoshaphat July

Jumping Jehoshaphat - It's July 15th already!

Quick - lets review Half Broke Horses and be done with it.  I am so enjoying the story in The Shoemaker's Wife I don't want to put it down.

So, what do you think about Half Broke Horses?  Personally I think that The Glass Castle was much more poignant and thought provoking.  If you haven't read that yet, give Jeanette Walls another chance and read it in a few months.  I was intrigued after the initial pages of the flood and the families recovery from that but the story never came to much in the way of conclusion or theme to me except as it led in to The Glass Castle which I think stands on it's own much better.  Does any of that make sense to you?  Agree? Disagree?


Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book and my thoughts on them:


At the end of Part I:  'Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had.  What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt'.  Isn't that the truth about life?  We all experience life in different ways and as I have said in the past - It isn't that you get through something, it's how that makes you a witness to your faith (or morals).


Lily contemplating where her life should go at the push from Mother Albertina:  "Teaching is a calling, too.  And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy -- angels leading their flocks out of the darkness."  When I read this passage my mind immediately went to Maria, with all her years of leading those preschoolers on a passage away from darkness into the light of knowledge.  Thank you to all those teachers who encouraged us to learn to read so we could enjoy such wonderful literature and stories and jokes, etc.  


Part III:  Lily is getting ready to leave home and her parents can't quite understand her desire to leave the comforts (sic) of home to travel the country.  He father especially doesn't like  the advancements of society. 
'What Dad didn't understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future  - it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.'    Are you a curser or grasper of the future?  Does it scare you?  Are there certain technologies you grasp while discounting others?  Don't you think this is the way humans have reacted to change throughout all time?  


Part V:  This chapter begins the healing after Helen committed suicide.  I liked this paragraph: 'I realized that in the months since Helen had died, I hadn't been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway.  It didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.'  Personally I think grieving is a process and the time when you finally notice the sun rising, or spring growth in the trees when before all was black is  life changing in its own way.  Goes back to climbing aboard life's adventures.  


I appreciate the times that Lily and her family lived in and gained some perspective on living through the depression out west as opposed to the city stories I have heard from family members.  Please tell me your thoughts on this book and Walls' other books if you have read them.


So in the end - why is the book called Half Broke Horses??  One reviewer says that Rose-Mary is half broke and that is explained in Glass Castle.  


Now, back to The Shoemaker's Wife......


Happy Reading,
Barbara