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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.82092
EAN: 9780743247535
Edition: First Edition
ISBN: 0743247531
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: March 01, 2005
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Amazon.com Review:
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
This book was sent by a great seller however, it is not an uplifting read. I can usually handle sad books but this book is just horribly frustrating from start to finish. Maybe this is what the author hoped to achieve and if so, she succeeded. However, I don't read in my free time with hopes that the books will depress me.
Rating:  -
Jeanette Walls's Glass Castle was a compelling story that is both familiar and unfamiliar to the common reader. Her real life horror story ultimately renews faith in human beings. Despite the horror these kids face throughout their childhood, they get a fairy tale happy ending. Glass Castle makes you wonder if you could survive an upbringing like this one and live to tell about it.
The memoir begins with meeting the Walls family living in a dilapidated trailer of a home. Jeanette's earliest memory is of cooking hotdogs at the age of three and badly burning herself with boiling water. What a terrible first memory to have. What kind of lucid parents would allow their three-year old to cook on a stove? These kinds of horrible stories occur throughout the book, and are why the book is so interesting to read. The average person isn't familiar with that sort of neglect therefore Glass Castle familiarizes you with what it would be like to be part of a family like Jeanette's. It's hard to sympathize with parents who have potential to provide a stable lifestyle for their family but refuse to act upon it. Rex was a mastermind with his hands, holding down jobs as an electrician, and drawing up architectural plans for the "glass castle". Jeanette's mother Rose Mary had a college degree for teaching but refused to hold down a stable career because it simply bored her. The book was difficult to put down because it constantly kept you guessing what kind of ridiculous things you'll come across next.
The memoir, familiar to the reader, shows us a family that is trying desperately to live the American Dream while going through trials and tribulations. What's not relatable to the reader, the fact that they screw it up every single time. The kids became very acquainted with a practice known as the "skedaddle." This was something Rex invented to run from the government who wanted to collect taxes and wanted payments on bills. The family bounced from Arizona, to California, and to West Virginia. In all these places they had a chance to start over, but all of these dreams were shattered when the parents started back on their old ways. Readers can sympathize with struggle and failure, yet the parent's malfunction in providing for their children time and time again becomes irreconcilable. The one redeeming quality of the novel is that the family tries desperately to stick together even when it's bad for them. Even when the kids were at points of near-starvation, they would always find a way to stay on their feet by working together. Whether this meant holding down odd jobs, or scrounging for food in school trash cans, they managed to get by. This is an admirable trait, because ultimately the reader wants the family to make it through.
Glass Castle makes you realize that all the awful things you thought couldn't happen, can. Most parents have warned their children about perverts while not really believing it could happen. Here, it happens in many different ways. Phoenix was very hot during the summer. Rex and Rose Mary saw the only way to cool the house was by leaving the doors and windows open at all times, even at night. Perverts entered the house, Jeanette was molested by one, and the parents didn't even show concern at this disgusting act against their daughter, let alone agree to lock the door. Throughout the book instances of molestation or near molestation occur right under the parent's noses. How could you allow such a thing to happen to your children? This book opens your eyes as to the fact that these things have to be happening more so than we commonly think.
Throughout the book the family drags you through their living nightmare to finally renew your faith in a happy ending. In the middle of the squalor of Welch WV, Jeanette finds her true calling in. She becomes involved in her high school newspaper and falls in love with the idea of writing for a career. She vows to herself to get out of Welch and out of the hold her parents have on her terrible life. At this point in the novel you finally feel a little sense of relief that these kids will make it out. After raising money on their own, they flee their parents grasp and head to New York City. There they find jobs, and create relationships and families of their own. As a reader, we finally see a happy ending that justifies the struggle.
Glass Castle is a story of the redemption of a family and the struggle to live the American dream. It's a story of starting over and realizing that people regardless of their past can have a future. Despite having hell for a childhood, these kids bonded together and walked through fire and came out alive.
Rating:  -
Ms Walls has written an amazing memoir. She tells her story with humor and without self-pity. This is one of those books that you tell everyone you know to read. It's one of those rare ones that I will keep and re-read. Great job! Looking forward to reading her other books.
Rating: -
are always your parents. Jeannette Walls learned a lot from her parents, despite the hardships and abuse. Luckily she was able glean the positive lessons: to dream, from her father, and to pursue her artistic talents, from her mother. Her parents were obviously mentally ill people and I figure she knows that now but did not understand that as a child. Her fascinating memoir was fast paced and seems like a series of slides, making it somewhat shattered, like her life, but I could not put it down. The writing style is more journalistic than literary, but the story makes up for all that. While reading it I did wonder how she remembered all the early years, but I supposed that she and her siblings must have discussed them, they seemed believable. I recommend this book and I am not a fan of autobiography in general, though I did love Angela's Ashes and do plan to read The Liar's Club now.
Rating: -
This book grabs your attention starting on page one, plus its very humerous; sometimes i would re-read parts because it was so funny!
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