About this title: Jeannette Walls's memoir revolves around her parents, who give the concept of bad parenting a whole new meaning. Her irresponsible romantic of a father was an inventor of outlandishly useless devices, and her mother, an artist, was his abettor. As the two of them dragged the family around the country on the run from creditors and from one bad idea ...
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Description: Very Good. B0012WZDYS **Softcover**--Very mild shelf wear. No personalizations, writing or marks in the text. Absolutely no spine creasing. Ships Quickly-IN STOCK-Satisfaction Guaranteed! read more
Edition: LRG
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: CTR POINT PUB (ME)
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781602855571ISBN:1602855579
Description: New. The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a penetrating look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant father captured his children's imagination, teaching them... read more
"I read this book for a book report project in my sophomore year in HS. Although the author's choice of words were average, she had the skill in telling stories that inspire people. After reading this book, I realized that in comparison to her life-stories, all my life-obstacles seem to be vague, to be nothing.
Many may see that the author did not put any quick-to-find themes and lessons; however, she did put a lot of valuable lessons for everyone. Through her writings, I found a lot of inspirations, such as you can fight against anything with your independence, and to never give up on anything.
This is a good book to read if you have any free time!"
"Mrs Ebarvia World Literature 10/21/08 The Glass Castle Book Review The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is a spectacular memoir. Jeanette Walls is a journalist and creative writer. She is one of four siblings and graduated from Barnard College. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, is being made into a movie. Her novel starts by explaining the typical ways of her poor family. She travels from place to place living in poor homes or in the family car. Her family finally ends up in Welch, West Virginia where she starts to learn how hard life can be especially when she is considered the minority. The novel was interesting because of the characterization of her family. Her family was very different from many that I consider normal today. Jeanette's father is an extreme alcoholic that spends most of their income on alcohol and cigarettes. The way that Jeanette describes her father is one thing that made the novel hard to put down. Even though Jeanette's father was an alcoholic, she still loves him and knows that he is very intelligent. Another thing that was interesting to me was the many different obstacles she has to deal with. For example, she had to learn to take care of herself and her siblings because her parents were too selfish and dysfunctional. Also, she has to work at an early age because her parents do not pay the rent for housing or buy food and clothing for themselves or their children. These things really caught my attention while reading the memoir. To make the novel more interesting, Jeanette Walls should have shared her feelings more often. While reading the book, I wanted to know how she was feeling after some of her hardships. Jeanette does explain what happens and I can sometimes infer some of her feelings but I wish she would actually explain exactly how she felt about some situations. For example, her mother wouldn't get a job because she was too wrapped in becoming an artist. I wanted to see how Jeanette feels about taking responsibility for her family and why she allows her mother do whatever she wanted. By adding Jeanette's personal thoughts, it would help the reader to understand the novel better. Regardless of its weaknesses, I really enjoyed the novel. The Glass Castle was well-written and interesting to read. Anyone who enjoys reading novels about different kinds of people would love to read this novel. It shows how hard life can be when people are viewed differently."
"One reviewer of this book dares us to put it down. Actually, the majority of the people in a group that read it with me did choose not to finish. I was one of the few who got to the end.
"The Glass Castle" is most definitely a page-turner. Without question, the consistently short chapters and the continuing barrage of extraordinary events make reading easier than stopping.
My own objection to it while reading was the absence of emotional response on the narrator's part. The author has been rightly praised for avoiding self-pity, but you just know she's leaving things out. Consider the part, very early on, when she is in the hospital and the family tells her she has won a helicopter ride. "I was thrilled," she writes. But in the next sentence her mother blithely goes on to say that the rest of the family has already enjoyed the ride without waiting for their little girl to get out of the hospital. Walls gives us no reaction at all to this outrage. Instead, she moves directly into an account of how her father threatens the doctor and then how nurses show the pity for her that she won't put on display herself.
The absence of emotion was explained to me by one reader on the grounds that it would have slowed down the all-important tempo. OK. So we're left with an unremitting series of events like the above and minimal reflection on them. As someone who has been writing a memoir of my own, I've learned that failing to provide reactions to events will draw complaints from almost every reader. I can't help wondering how Walls gets away with this.
My friends who gave up on the book did so because, at some point, they lost patience with that ongoing series of events that seemed to lead only to worse and worse situations.
The other concern did not occur to me while reading the book, but it came up afterwards in discussion. There's little doubt that the basic elements of the story are true -- that the children in her family suffered the effects of having parents who were alcoholic, mentally ill, and pathologically irresponsible -- and yet some nagging little questions undermine it.
Just to pick one example: How believable is it that a small child, huddled fearfully under the blankets after seeing her grandmother sexually molest her brother, would hypothesize that their father had been similarly abused when he was little, and that this could explain his odd behavior? I think it's much more likely that this insight occurred to the author years later. But to keep the momentum going strong, she didn't want to step in with that perspective. So she lets her third-grade self, barely surviving in Appalachian poverty in (I presume) the 1960s, suddenly become a psychologist. When you stop to think about it, that's more jarring than a comment from the adult author would have been.
What this review seems to be saying is that I, as a reader, feel manipulated. We are shown some tough little kids, kids who walk away from a gunfight with no sign of trauma other than the narrator's regret at being forced to abandon a rock collection, and we still don't know what makes them tick. Walls has taken her story, which again I'm sure is basically true, and in the interests of maximizing commercial success has shaped it in a way that perhaps sacrifices an understanding of how the kids survived.
Perhaps I'm being too hard on her. Please balance this review against the others and draw your own conclusions. I'm not sorry to have read it, but I don't feel that anything was gained from having done so."
""The Glass Castle" is a memoir written by gossip columnist Jeanette Walls, which details her unconventional childhood growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother who seems to be mentally ill. Walls begins the book by explaining what has prompted her to write about her family: after she has "made it" and become a successful writer living in New York, she comes across her mother picking trash out of a dumpster and, in shame, slinks down in her taxi seat and pretends not to see or know her. Later, Walls confronts her mother, asking what she is supposed to tell people about her parents, and her mother replies, "Just tell the truth. That's simple enough."
Of course, "The Glass Castle" is anything but simple, as Walls attempts to come to terms with her upbringing. The first third of the memoir deals with her young childhood on the west coast, as her parents live as nomads, moving frequently between desert towns, always seeking the next adventure. Walls' mother is the key figure we meet here: an artist and a writer, she seems to live in her own world and doesn't express much concern in the practical realities of raising her children. In a key passage, Walls' mother takes the kids with her to give them art lessons, as she paints and studies the Joshua tree. Walls tells her mother of her plan to dig up the tree, replant it, and protect it so it can go straight. Walls' mother admonishes her, "You'd be destroying what makes it special. It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives its beauty." This appears to be Walls' mother's philosophy of life - looking for the next struggle - as the family willingly gives up its nice residence in Phoenix that Walls' mother had inherited from her family to move to the father's home town - a depressed coal town in West Virginia.
The family's time in West Virginia makes up the next third of the story and depicts a depressed life in a depressed town. It is in West Virginia where the family seems to drift apart, particularly Walls' father, who up to this point, had been worshipped and revered by his daughter. Like Walls' mom, her dad has a lot of imagination; while he takes odd jobs that never last long, his real dream is to strike it rich with one of his inventions. He promises, once he has found his gold, that he is going to build a "glass castle" - his most special project - a great big house for the family to live in. Once in West Virginia, Walls and her brother figure they will make the best of the situation, and they spend a month digging a hole in the ground to serve as the foundation for the glass castle. But because the family can't pay for trash collection, their father instructs them instead to use the hole for the family's garbage. Although she has always been her father's defender, Walls grows disillusioned with her father, eventually telling him he will never build the glass castle.
Determined not to end up like her parents, Walls moves to New York, where the last third of the book transpires. It is here that Walls "makes it," graduating from college, gaining employment as a writer, marrying a rich husband, and settling into a Park Avenue apartment. Interestingly, while Walls has rejected her parents' lifestyle, it is now their turn to reject hers. Her father refuses to visit the Park Avenue apartment, while her mother, after visiting the apartment, asks Walls, "Where are the values I raised you with?" At this point, it is a mystery what values Walls actually possesses. By crafting the memoir around stories of her childhood, we as readers are often troubled, not just because of the content of the stories but because the stories don't provide much in the way of reflection or introspection. It is, in fact, unclear what Walls actually does value - will she continue to identify success with the material trappings of her "normal" life in New York, or will she ultimately reject the conventional life, as her parents did? Without more reflection from Walls, particularly in this concluding section of the book, readers are left to their own interpretation of "the truth" about her parents - are they just a drunk father and a lazy mother, or is there something more to it?
The "Glass Castle" is an addicting page-turner that should captivate any reader. However, without this reflection and introspection from Walls about her childhood, the book misses an opportunity to make a more lasting impact on readers and ultimately fails to reach the level of a work like "Angela's Ashes." In the end, it is up to readers to make up their own minds about "the truth" of Walls' parents and her upbringing and what it all means. I chose to discount some of her parents' flaws and instead read this book as an homage to her parents. To me, the key passage in the book is when Walls visits a classmate's home in West Virginia and sees the empty walls in the house (in stark contrast to her own home, which is cluttered with paintings and books and decorations) and rejects the notion that her classmate's father, passed out on the couch, bares any resemblance to her own father. After Walls recounts the story to her family, her mother replies that she should show compassion for her classmate because not everybody has "all the advantages you kids do." Although the statement is ironic on its face, as the family fights over the crumbs of a chocolate bar, the distinction is clear: Walls' family may not provide her with much in the way of tangible goods, but they give her things that are more lasting - a belief in herself, a passion for reading and writing, an appreciation for things a lot of us take for granted, and most of all love. In the end, it was not important whether her parents actually built her a glass castle. It was that they gave her the idea of a glass castle. By overcoming her shame for her parents and writing this memoir, Walls seems to recognize this truth about her parents - that, like the Joshua tree, there was beauty in their struggle."
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