by Jeannette Walls
The opening sentence: “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I’d overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.”
I was hooked from that first sentence. Jeannette Walls goes on to describe her childhood, and it was not a pretty one, in most respects. She does so in such a way that she honors her parents and her upbringing, and leaves the reader wondering about the virtues of poverty as over against the abundance of “things” we give our children in today’s world. Though my interest in her writing was strong because of similarities in our backgrounds and feelings resulting from those similar events, I still was shocked by some of the happenings in her life, and appalled at others.
The story of how she and her siblings managed to escape and make a better life for themselves is riveting. One of the gifts her parents gave the children was a love of learning and reading. Through this gift, and a second gift, the belief that they could do anything they set their mind to, they lifted themselves up and out, each in their own unique way.
Jeannette Walls’ own words say it best: While writing “The Glass Castle”, I kept asking myself, ‘Who is going to care about the life story of some pathetic little girl and her wacky family?’ Sure, my past was eventful, but it was so different from most, that I was afraid no one would connect with it. Who could relate to someone who slept in a cardboard box, often went hungry and ended up living on Park Avenue while her parents went homeless?
I related to much of it. Thousands of others have connected, too. I am still thinking about the book, two weeks after closing the final chapter. I will never stop thinking about it, because in it I find so many similar details about my own life, all those things that I have never told anyone before because of shame. The fact that Ms. Walls has done it has lifted me up in some strange way, and loosened some of the chains of my own past.
Review by Sharon Nale
I was hooked from that first sentence. Jeannette Walls goes on to describe her childhood, and it was not a pretty one, in most respects. She does so in such a way that she honors her parents and her upbringing, and leaves the reader wondering about the virtues of poverty as over against the abundance of “things” we give our children in today’s world. Though my interest in her writing was strong because of similarities in our backgrounds and feelings resulting from those similar events, I still was shocked by some of the happenings in her life, and appalled at others.
The story of how she and her siblings managed to escape and make a better life for themselves is riveting. One of the gifts her parents gave the children was a love of learning and reading. Through this gift, and a second gift, the belief that they could do anything they set their mind to, they lifted themselves up and out, each in their own unique way.
Jeannette Walls’ own words say it best: While writing “The Glass Castle”, I kept asking myself, ‘Who is going to care about the life story of some pathetic little girl and her wacky family?’ Sure, my past was eventful, but it was so different from most, that I was afraid no one would connect with it. Who could relate to someone who slept in a cardboard box, often went hungry and ended up living on Park Avenue while her parents went homeless?
I related to much of it. Thousands of others have connected, too. I am still thinking about the book, two weeks after closing the final chapter. I will never stop thinking about it, because in it I find so many similar details about my own life, all those things that I have never told anyone before because of shame. The fact that Ms. Walls has done it has lifted me up in some strange way, and loosened some of the chains of my own past.
Review by Sharon Nale
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