HALF BROKE

An engaging debut memoir about the rehabilitation of damaged horses—and humans.

The Delancey Street Foundation’s New Mexico ranch is an alternative prison facility where drug offenders can serve out their sentences. Gaffney, a horse trainer and riding instructor, has volunteered at the ranch since 2013. It initially presented “the most dangerous horse situation I had ever encountered,” she recalls: The herd had gone feral, raiding dumpsters and threatening their keepers. Two mares, including Luna, who had an infected facial injury, were still on the loose. The author believed that livestock team members like Tony, an ex-junkie with anger issues, and Sarah, a former addict and prostitute who’d survived multiple near-fatal attacks, were “unknowingly communicating their pain to the horses.” Gaffney’s first task, then, was to teach the inmates to walk with confidence. Horses “keep us present, keen, concentrating,” she writes. They help Randy conquer his fears and Eliza snap out of her depression. Former addictions remain strong temptations for these residents, though. In a major setback, Gaffney found a stash of drugs and condoms under the barn floorboards, and most of the livestock team got kicked off the ranch. Sharp descriptions bring the book’s human and equine characters to life while present-tense narration animates vivid vignettes: rescuing one horse from a septic field and training another in a 100-day Santa Fe Horse Shelter competition. The book shifts easily between the ranch storyline and the author’s history of extreme introversion and fraught lesbian relationships. The first horse she owned, high-strung Belle, “hinged the broken parts of me back together,” as did her long-term partner, Glenda. This 1990s-set strand feels less essential, but it helps build a solid trajectory of recovery as Gaffney, like the ranch’s residents and horses, changes “into a softer creature…one who can finally trust others and feel like she belongs.”

A heartening story of healing and interspecies connection.