Book Review: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
After I started reading The Glass Castle, I discovered that everyone and their mother already read it in their high school English classes. I’m shocked (and jealous) that not everyone was forced to read Lord of the Flies against their will, but I’m glad I got around to this book eventually.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir of her incredibly unconventional and difficult childhood with her parents: “people who lived unruly lives battling authority and liked it that way.” She weaves years of neglect and abuse into a raw story about perseverance and love.
My childhood was unconventional — albeit to a much, much lesser degree — so I related on a certain level to the bond that comes from a family going through something. There’s a type of interconnectedness that can only come from struggling together.
Walls showed the good, the bad, and the ugly of her parents without ever giving the impression that she loved them any less. She wrote about memories of adventures gone wrong to demonstrate how life with her family could turn from exhilarating to frightening in the blink of an eye.
The reader grows up with Walls as the book goes on. At the start of the memoir, she says life with her parents is an adventure, but by the end of the book, she sees it as a nightmare — and the reader does too.
Walls also uses incredible detail to describe the various beautiful and not-so-beautiful spots the family finds themselves in. Some of the most memorable passages come from the beginning of the novel where the family lives in a shack in the desert.
“At twilight, once the sun had slid behind the Palen Mountains, the bats came out and swirled through the sky above the shacks of Midland.”
This sentence leads into a ridiculous description of Jeannette and her brother’s dreams to catch a bat and hold onto it with a string, but the original scene is stunning. Walls makes life with her family sound like a scene from a movie, with bright colors and amazing adventures — and tragedies to match.
I think one of the reasons this book has resonated with so many people is its complete commitment to honesty. Walls doesn’t shy away from the contradictions of her family life, and reading this book encourages us to accept our own complicated families.
The Glass Castle is a beautiful book with a beautiful message. I loved it.
