Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

This is an interesting memoir/novel that tells the story of the author's grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. She was born in 1901 in a one-room dugout in the western part of Texas. The beginning of the book describes her life their as a child and opens with her saving her siblings from one of the flash flood that come out of no where and can sweep people and animals away in an instant. She grabs her younger siblings and climbs up a tree with them where the stay overnight. She has to keep prodding them, and engaging them with singing and other activities because if they fell asleep, they'd lose their grip on the tree, fall and be drowned. You get a sense early on just what kind of strong, self-reliant woman this young girl will become.
The book takes place over many decades and follows Lily through her stints as a horse and cattle rancher, wife (twice - her first marriage is a disaster, but life-changing) a maid, a teacher, aviator, and eventually a mother to Rose Mary, a daughter who possesses many of the same characteristics as her mother, but not the common sense. The author, Jeannette is the daughter of Rose Mary and Rex. Lily was not in favor of Rose Mary's marriage to Rex. As Lily says to Rex, “My daughter needs an anchor,”  Rex retorts, “The problem with being attached to an anchor, is that it makes it 'hard to fly.' ”
Now that I have read this book, I need to read the author's other book, Glass Castles, which the young woman in the Library recommended when she checked me out with this book.