Half Broke by Ginger Gaffney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When you have been around horses long enough, you begin to see and feel and understand things about them and their relationships with humans that other people simply can’t. I can’t watch a Western movie without judging how well the actors ride (Redford, Duvall, Mortenson – they can sit a horse!). There are times when I’ve read novels in which horses feature prominently, and think: this writer “gets” horses (Madison Smartt Bell, Mary Doria Russell, Dick Francis at his and Mary’s best), and sure enough, they have been around them in a serious way. And so, by god, has Ginger Gaffney. She “gets” how they look, how they move, what they like, how they snuffle and snort and bare their teeth and lash out. And she can write about it – beautifully, vividly. What makes “Half Broke” special and rising way above most the of zillions of “how this [horse, rescue dog, stray cat…] saved my life” memoirs infesting the book shelves these days, is how she, as a introverted, silent person so uneasy with people that she barely spoke until the age of 6, takes what she has studied and internalized about horses and interacting with them and uses it to learn to relate to a group of damaged, bottomed-out drug addicts and criminals on an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico.
Gaffney, an experienced horse trainer by vocation, is called in to the ranch because the half dozen or so horses who have been “donated” to the ranch are basically feral. Unschooled, unbroke, violent, uncontrollable, they represent the “most dangerous horse situation [she has] ever encountered.” And she has zero experience or training for working with the ranch residents: some cocky and defiant, others caved in on themselves, traumatized, manipulative, or hostile. Over the course of a year or so, Gaffney has to figure out how to get these two herds to settle, to relate, and to not kill themselves or each other.
One by one, horse by horse, person by person, she confronts, soothes, observes, teaches, and worries. Before the residents can handle the horses, she has to teach the humans how to walk: upright, head back, loose relaxed strides… they barely comprehend what she means. But it is crucial: it’s the body language, the projection of confidence that horses, creatures of movement and flight and tension, rely on absolutely for the development of trust and understanding.
It is hard work. There are setbacks: residents we have come to root for and care about fail and it’s heartbreaking. But as a recovering addict friend reminds her: “You do know not everyone makes it out, right?” There are moments of grace, moments of fear, moments of challenge, moments of triumph. There are also moments of some overwritten navel-gazing that, while they explain some of Gaffney’s own back story and troubles, are not as compelling. There’s a terrific chapter about a clinic with “a famous trainer” who pressures Gaffney into ignoring her own (extremely sensitive and astute) instincts regarding a willful, terrified filly that results in injury to both Gaffney and the horse – she learns she need to listen to the horse and herself, not necessarily the “famous trainer” and his swaggering male acolytes.
And the cover illustration is absolutely gorgeous. What more could you want?
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