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| The Glass Castle: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeannette Walls
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $1.77
You Save: $13.23 (88%)
New (106) Used (347) Collectible (8) from $1.77
Avg. Customer Rating:  1140 reviews
Sales Rank: 646
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 074324754X
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.82092
EAN: 9780743247542
ASIN: 074324754X
Publication Date: January 9, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Horrific Childhood but I'm Okay memoir. November 2, 2005
40 out of 50 found this review helpful
I cringe to hear descriptions of Walls' parents as "eccentric."
The apt term is criminally negligent, and you can't help but wonder what Walls wants us to feel about them after relating the chaotic childhood that she and her siblings barely survive. Her alcoholic father was supposedly "brilliant" yet he never appears in these pages as anything other than a garden variety lush. He steals money from his kids to drink, disappears for days, takes his 13-year-old daughter to a bar to lure pool pigeons. An alkie is an alkie, and any insightful person tries very hard to understand that there is nothing distinguished about them. Her mother sounds bipolar, but in any case is relentlessly childish, selfish, and neglectful, never even registering that her kids are hungry although there is no food in the refrigerator for days. Eccentric mom is perfectly capable of getting a good job teaching, but this is beneath her. Walls almost dies on more than one occasion because mummy dearest is painting....(pictures, not walls). Yeah, these two are so endearingly quirky, aren't they. The title of this memoir refers to the dream house and engineering marvel that her father is going to build for them. When the kids finally try, in desperation, to manifest this promised fantasy by digging a hole for the foundation, her parents quickly fill it up with garbage. They subsequently become known in the small town where they live as the kids "who live in garbage."
Abused and neglected kids can be forgiven for wanting to weave a narrative from their traumatic experience. What is troubling about this memoir is that Walls seems to cling so tenaciously to her story of how Daddy loved her so much, and so specially, and how her parent's selfish neglect included a self-serving spin on how they should turn adversity into triumph. She never comes close to acknowledging what it feels like to confront the fact that dad loved something else a whole lot more than he loved her. In fact, we learn little of Walls' experiences as an adult struggling to process what it really means to live with her parent's garbage. She seems to have emerged unscathed, other than suffering pangs of embarassment over her mother's dumpster diving. Her younger sister appears not to have been so sturdy or fortunate, but Walls glosses over this sad fact.
Maybe in another book.....
 Venus Belongs to Walls March 16, 2005
36 out of 39 found this review helpful
"My parents, Rose Mary and Rex Walls, and their wedding day - 1956".
There it is. A photo of a young couple, in love, flush with promise. The bride looking shy at the camera. The groom, square jawed and filled with good humor. It's stunning to think that this handsome, newly married couple, would live their lives in squalor, alcoholism and dreams. This picture is very much part of the story of Jeannette Walls and her family, as it sets the tone on the very first page of this wonderful, heartbreaking memoir.
Jeannette's sisters Lori, Maureen and brother Brian, endured a childhood that could have been torn out of the history pages citing the Great Depression. It's hard to believe that these were the 1960's and 1970's in America. Starvation, bad hygiene, and lack of personal safety was an everyday habit in the Walls home - or homes - since they moved from town to town. The kid's upbringing was almost literally, either sink or swim. Much like the wind blown Joshua Tree they saw by the side of the road during one of their family "skadaddles", the kids grew against the force, became tough, and learned survivial despite the adversities.
Both parents were incredibly bright and talented beings. Sadly, they had big schemes on which they could never follow through. Rex Walls was a mathematician who came from a squalor home in West Virginia, and Rose Mary was a prolific artist and teacher who was raised in an upper middle class family out west. What seemed to bond them was an adamant need to spurn the norms of society. This resulted in an inability to stay at the same job for long. They'd lose their homes, and inevitably shack up in their car or any broken down house they could find. This meant the children suffered. They'd constantly be uprooted, and taken out of school. With no money for everyday items, they'd find food and clothes in dumpsters. School children or other family members would abuse them, physically or sexually. Father, a raging drunk, drank up all the money they made. In one period of time, while living in a small home that could be described as a shack, the parents refused to lock their doors, which invited wanderers to come in and out during the night making the children open targets for various perversions.
All long range plans they devined would either die out or be scratched, such as the building of a glass castle in which Rex had drawn up meticulous architectual plans. The aforementioned ramshackled home they lived in came with a backyard where Rex and his kids began to dig a hole for the foundation of this little palace. Sadly, the job was left abandoned. More of a ditch than a foundation, it was ultimately turned into their own landfill when they didn't have tax money for municiple garbage removal. It's quite a metaphor for their lives - dreams left abandoned for garbage. Yet, despite all the trouble and strife, one theme remains consistant: their love for each other was strong. The family, kids especially, stood by each other through all the bad times.
The parents remained stubborn in clinging to poverty, deeming it poetic and noble, turning down any means of charity, even from their own children. For instance, when the kids had grown and found their way to Manhattan to start anew, the parents followed them, finding shelter in their cramped apartments. Despite the incessant pleas of their children to stay with them, they declined, opting to go it alone, ultimately setting up house in an abandoned building, embracing what we would call utter despair, as a one great big wonderful adventure.
The stories unfold with a pure voice, no judgement or bitterness clouds Walls' telling of her family. Each horrible, enraging moment is given a morsel of wonder, such as Rex gazing up at the stars one Christmas, and giving Jeanette the planet Venus as a present since monetary gifts were impossible. In such a remembrance, and many others told between the frighening scenes, Walls makes it clear that her folks were free souls who shared their love in strange ways.
This book will give you chills, and it will also make you think about homelessness and the unique stories these souls carry. Much praise should be given to Walls and her siblings, for having walked through fire, and coming out alive.
 Credulity Suspended June 17, 2005
36 out of 59 found this review helpful
Walls' book is very troubling to thoughtful readers and to anyone who has suffered the childhood she purports to have experienced. Although it seems unlikely that a three year old would have such detailed memories, I was more disturbed by the anachronisms and the contradictions. Example: Dad tosses the family cat from the moving car but later sums up a rage worthy of PETA or the World Wildlife Federation when a woman calls the police because a mountain lion "who had as much right to his life as that sour old biddy" has wandered into her back yard. Further, to compare her work - as an overwhelming number of reviewers did - to Angela's Ashes or Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is just sad. I find myself in an uncomfortable and contradictory situation: I am angry at a memoir that seems to me deceitful, but I find myself wishing every word were true. However I look at it, Walls has failed. She is either lacking in skill to write convincingly of her tragic life - or she is being dishonest with her audience. Either way, that too is exceedingly sad.
I could not put this one down April 19, 2007
34 out of 37 found this review helpful
The Glass Castle is the most amazing memoir I have ever read. I admire Jeannette Walls so much for having the courage to write down the good, the bad and the ugly and spin it into something this eloquent.
The Glass castle will open the eyes of some people to the plight of lower classes and will make others strongly identify with her. Poor no longer equals Oliver Twist in literature. She makes it very real. Eating plain butter or beans that have started to turn bad will make anyone beg for Oliver's meal.
Anyone that could not stand to be near his or her father but loved them fiercely anyway will connect with Jeannette.
 Ugh March 29, 2006
31 out of 49 found this review helpful
The Glass Castle was, overall, well-written. A reader gains an up-close-and-personal view of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother whose minimal parenting instincts are drowned out by their self-absorbtion and desire to live with no responsibilities.
However, I found the characters to be so unlikeable as to be repellent. I wouldn't have finished the book had it not been a book club selection. I wasn't compelled to keep reading about such horrid people. Mr. and Mrs. Walls refuse "charity" when offered clothes from the church bazaar but shoplift apparel with no qualms. They claim to care about Nature and rant and rave against humans who encroach on the wilderness, but have no compunction in turning a vacant lot, and then their own front yard, into a giant personal garbage dump. They own more than $1million in assets yet their youngest daughter is fed throughout her childhood almost exclusively by kindly neighbours who no doubt have far more limited resources. Mrs. Walls rants that her daughter has such skewed values that she in danger of turning into a Republican. But she herself is a millionaire who gets aid for her daughter to attend an Ivy League University and buys an apartment from the city of New York for one dollar: talk about financial breaks for the rich!
As for the protagonist: as a child, she is a sympathetic narrator. However, always in the back of my mind while reading is the fact that she has now grown up to become a vicious gossip monger, who maintains her elite lifestyle by dragging other people's names through the mud. Also, having married two wealthy men certainly doesn't hurt in paddig her posh lifestyle, either.
And while Walls shows plenty of compassion and love for her deeply flawed parents, I never once sense any sort of gratitude for all the families who fed her sister Maureen over the years, or some student - whose mother probably didn't own a 2 carat diamond ring or a 7-figure piece of land in Texas - who missed the opportunity to attend Barnard because Walls received the scholarships and grants instead. I would have appreciated that more global sense of perspective from the narrator, but it was disturbingly lacking.
If you can slog through a series of interesting situations with a cast of repugnant characters, this book is for you. It certainly wasn't for me.
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