“Perhaps you’ve heard of equine therapy, of how time spent with a horse can stitch a person back together, tethering mind and spirit back to the body. It’s easy to doubt such magic. But reader, trust me: no matter your belief or understanding, prepare to be changed, because in the pages of Half Broke is the rare gift of story exquisitely told, a book that shows us how to save ourselves by saving what we’ve left behind—our animal body and its necessary connection to the animal world, specifically to horses, even those troubled, half-broke beings just as damaged as us. In these pages is wisdom that will gallop in your blood, calling you to experience what Ginger Gaffney found in the stables and fields of a drug rehab facility in New Mexico, calling you to then use that healing for yourself and those creatures who need it most, both human and not.”
Half Broke
An alternative prison ranch in New Mexico conducts a daring experiment: setting the troubled residents out to retrain an aggressive herd of horses. The horses and prisoners both arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many— the horses often abandoned and suspicious, the residents, some battling drug and alcohol addiction, emotionally, physically, and financially shattered. Ginger Gaffney’s job is to retrain the untrainable. With time, the horses and residents form a profound bond, and teach each other patience, control, and trust.
As Gaffney peels away the layers of her own story— a solitary childhood, painful introversion, and a trans-formative connection with her first horse, a filly named Belle— she, too, learns to trust people as much as she trusts horses. Half Broke is a resonant memoir with a spirited, memorable cast that describes the fascinating ways both horses and humans seek relationships to survive.