The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
From back of book
The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory book into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family.
The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.
Is there a way to be the perfect parent? How should someone parent their children? Is it okay to put certain things over a child’s needs? All of these questions were answered for me in The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Jeanette tells the story of what life was like living with her parents and three siblings. As an adult Jeannette is riding in a taxi cab through New York City when she notices her homeless mother picking through garbage on the street. Because her mother chose to be homeless while she was living a successful life, she starts to feel ashamed and reflects on how her parents neglectfulness affected her life. Since she was three years old Jeanette had always remember living on the run with her family, and in this book she shares the story of this nomadic lifestyle. This book had me glued to the pages with it’s interesting characters, it’s many different settings, and it’s great plot. This book was an absolute joy to read.
First, the interesting characters in the book were very cool to read about. The protagonist of this novel was also the author, Jeannette Walls. She was a great dynamic character because she changed a lot from the beginning of the story. For example, when she was little she always had faith in her alcoholic father. She thought he was a super hero and had the ability to do anything. However, later on in the book when she’s a young woman her opinion of him changes as a result of his drinking problem. Jeannette also had three siblings named Lori, Brian, and Maureen, which were round characters. For example, her sister Lori was the oldest kid in the family, but wasn’t the dominate one. Even though she was very smart and thoughtful she always needed Jeannette in order to boost her courage. Jeannette’s parents were the static characters of the book. Her father, Rex Walls, was a typical alcoholic. He used his family to fulfill his wants and needs, but yet he still loved them unconditionally. Her mother, Rose Mary, was artistic and selfish. She was a great artist, but she was always ignoring her family’s needs by trying to fulfill her dreams of becoming an artist. For example, sometimes she would get a teaching job, but she would eventually quit because she said that it was boring to her and just go right back to painting. She loved her family more than anything, but only after she met her own needs. Rex and Rose Mary also didn’t really value their children’s safety. For example, in the beginning of the book Jeannette talks about how she was in the hospital when she was three years old being treated for burns that she acquired from boiling hotdogs by herself. Not only was it bad enough that her parents let her cook on a stove all by herself, but her father takes it upon himself to sneak her out of the hospital when she wasn’t fully healed yet. Rex sneaks her out to the car and says, “You don’t have to worry anymore, baby. You’re safe now.” This was really ironic considering that he was the one putting her in danger.
Next, the many different settings were one of my favorite elements of this book. The Walls were a very nomadic type of family. Rex and Rose Mary were always moving the family around from place to place. Throughout the book The Walls traveled to different places such as Las Vegas, Battle Mountain, San Francisco, Phoenix, Welch, and New York City. In one part of the book Jeannette talks about her family’s constant travels. She said, “We moved around like nomads. We lived in dust little mining towns in Nevada, Arizona, and California. They were usually nothing but a cluster of sad, sunken shacks, a gas station, a dry goods store, and a bar or two. They had names like Needles and Bouse, Pie, Goffs, and Why, and they were near places like the Superstition Mountainsm the dries-up Soda Lake, and the Old Woman Mountain. The more desolate and isolated a place was, the better Mom and Dad liked it.” The constant change of setting makes this book very interesting to read because usually a setting has a big impact on the plot. For example, when the family lived with Rex’s mother all of the characters fought. This change happened because the charcters were in new surroundings and living with Rex’s extremely mean mother.
Finally, this book’s great plot kept me interested the whole time I was reading. The author did a great job using foreshadowing. For example, in the very beginning of the story when Jeannette comes home she looks around her expensive house and starts to feel guilty. She said, “I look around the room. There were turn-of-the-century bronze-and-silver vases and the old books with worn leather spines that I’d collected at flea markets.” She then later goes on and says, “I tried to make a home for myself here, tried to turn the apartment into the sort of place where the person I wanted to be would live. But I could never enjoy the room without worrying about Mom and Dad huddled on a sidewalk grate somewhere. I fretted about them, but I was embarrassed by them, too, and ashamed of myself for wearing pearls and living on Park Avenue while my parents were busy keeping warm and finding something to eat.” This bit of foreshadowing let’s the reader know that later on in the story her parents had made bad choices to get themselves into this situation.
In conclusion, this book had me glued to the pages with it’s interesting characters, it’s many different settings, and it’s great plot. I recommend this book to only mature teenagers and adults. I give this specific recommendation because the book contains a lot of cursing and adult situations. This book was an absolute joy to read, and I never wanted it to end. I’m not normally a big fan of memoirs, but this book was amazing. Jeannette Walls is an incredible author, and this book really showed it. Because I liked this book so much, I will now try to read other memoir books. I was hooked to every word that this book had to offer. It was really interesting learning about the Walls family, and it was great reading about all of the crazy things that happened in their life. I loved this book, and it is now in my list of favorites.
