Anchor plot: Set in the mid-1960s, the story centers on ten-year-old Harriet Frankovitz, a lonely outcast who lives with her mother and older sister Gwen in a dilapidated New Hampshire motel with cabins shaped like tipis her mother received as part of her divorce settlement. Harriet has a strong desire to escape her dull existence by means of any one of a number of creative ways - a magic carpet she tries to fly off the roof, on board a flying saucer she anxiously awaits in the schoolyard, through a tunnel she has been digging to China, or by attaching helium-filled balloons to a lawn chair. Mrs. Frankovitz is a bitter alcoholic with a propensity for driving on the wrong side of the road, while Gwen has sexual encounters with a series of men in vacant rooms. Terminally ill Leah Schroth is en route to an institution where she plans to admit her intellectually disabled son Ricky when their car breaks down near the motel, and the two stay there while waiting for the vehicle to be repaired. Mrs. Frankovitz is killed in an automobile accident, and Harriet discovers Gwen is her biological mother. The distressed girl and her new friend run away and set up house in an abandoned caboose concealed beneath dense foliage in the woods. When Ricky becomes ill, Harriet is forced to seek medical assistance for him. Once he recovers, his mother sets off with him to complete their interrupted journey, leaving Gwen and Harriet to learn to interact in their new roles of mother and daughter.

Plot A: Jeanne, a married woman with two young children, starts to notice small changes taking place in the arrangement of objects in her family's home—furniture, pictures, rooms—as well as in her physical appearance. She seems to be the only one noticing these changes, but still she is absolutely certain that her perceptions are a result of something personal, as everyone else seems to think. Feeling increasingly out of sorts, ever more distant, and even psychologically cut off from her husband and children, who are baffled by her behavior, Jeanne goes to her mother in the hope that she, at least, will provide for her some clarification or otherwise soothing solution.
At her mother's home, Jeanne comes across a photograph of what she believes, or has been led to believe, is herself as a young girl, her mother, and another woman. What she sees in that photograph moves her to travel to Italy in order to track down the woman in the photograph. In Italy, Jeanne finds the woman, and in a way, discovers herself as well. She begins to solve the mystery behind her changes, and comes to learn the truth about herself.

Plot B: Half Broke Horses is the story of Lily Casey Smith's life. Author Jeannette Walls, the granddaughter of Lily Casey Smith, wrote the book from Lily's perspective.
As a child growing up on the frontier in Texas, Lily learns how to break horses. At the age of fifteen, she rode five hundred miles, alone, to get to her job as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. Later in her life, Lily runs a vast cattle ranch in Arizona, along with her second husband and their two children. A woman of many talents, Lily earns extra money at various points in her life by playing poker, selling bootleg liquor, and riding in horse races.
Half Broke Horses depicts the freedom of rural life, its joys and struggles, and celebrates the courage and spirit of its protagonist, Lily Casey Smith. Walls says the book is “in the vein of an oral history, a retelling of stories handed down by my family through the years, and undertaken with the storyteller’s traditional liberties.”