Readers fell in love with Jeannette Walls' unforgettable family in The Glass Castle. Now discover how it all began for the Walls family...

'I never knew a girl to have such gumption,' [Mom would] say. 'But I'm not too sure that's a good thing.'

Meet Lily Casey Smith: horse-trainer, airplane pilot, flapper, mother and teacher. Born in 1901 in the rolling grassland of West Texas, Lily grows up with a passion for horses and an indomitable spirit. At age 15 she leaves home, riding 500 miles across the American West on her beloved pony Patch, her pearl-handled six-shooter by her side. Her goal: a teaching post in a frontier-town school.

Lily will handle everything life throws at her - flash-floods, tornadoes, the Great Depression, a swindling husband, love and heartbreak - with courage, determination and a smile as wide as the Texas skies.
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'With convincing, unprettified narration, Walls weaves her own ancestor into this collective rough-and-tumble heritage... [Walls is] the third generation of a line of indomitable women whose paths she has inscribed on the permanent record, enriching the common legend of our American past' New York Times

'A commendable chronicle of an admirably tough woman on America's western frontier' Washington Post

'Has immense power and readibility... What it does with aplomb is to track the birth of a nation: the conjuring of modern America from a scorched, dusty wasteland' The Times