The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls Review

Title: The Glass Castle
Author: Jeannette Walls
Genre: Nonfiction, memoire
Pages: 288
Rating: 5 Stars

Synopsis

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look 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.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing–a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.

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Why did I wait so long to read this?! Iv’e been told by so many people to read this book, I saw it on sale at Chapters a few week’s back and decided to finally buy it. A million stars!!! I LOVED this book! The chapters are short and direct, and I flew through the book. I wanted to savour the story but also needed to know how it would end. Beautiful, heartbreaking story of a girl growing up in poverty.

What I loved most about the story was how Jeannette captured the vivid emotions of a child growing up cold and with nothing to eat. As a child Jeannette found awe and wonder in her life, always on the move, new adventures. Then in her teens she started to see that their hunger and poverty were completely the fault of her parents. She still loved her parents but became more ashamed of there way of life as she got older. The embarrassment of not having food at lunch and her dirty clothes.

Although the parents are incredibly flawed and downright negligent, you also believed they loved each other. It is impossible to read this book and not want to strangle these parents. The father always running away so he avoids paying bills and running from bad debts always doing the skedaddle made me laugh out loud many times. In my opinion, as bad as Jeanette’s father was, her mother was worse. She hated domesticity, and couldn’t be bothered to raise her children properly. She is lazy and self centred.

I think everyone should pick up this book. It really is amazing!!

I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.

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