The Glass Castle Review

Title of the Book: The Glass Castle
Author: Jeannette Walls
Number of Pages: 288
Rating: ☆☆☆☆


 Review: When I look back upon my childhood I see moments spent with family and friends, birthday parties, shared dinners, and overall happy memories. The same could not be said about Jeannette Walls who tells her story about her childhood and how it impacted her in her book The Glass Castle. Jeannette begins her story when she was very little. She remembers vividly how she got severely burned when her dress caught on fire, cooking hot-dogs at the age of three. Jeannette grew up in a very unstable family dynamic. Her family was always moving from place to place doing what her father liked to call the Skedaddle. This made life for her and her family very difficult. Her parents were always struggling and had a hard time providing the basics for Jeannette and her siblings. This left Jeannette and the others to fend for themselves a lot of the time. As Jeannette grows older her family settles down in Welch, West Virginia. This was where Jeannette had the most stability, mainly in the sense that her house had stayed the same for an extended period of time. Although Jeannette's family had stopped moving, she never seemed to catch her break. She had tremendous responsibility to take care of her siblings, and her dad was constantly drunk and blew through all of the family money. Jeannette never let these hardships stand in her way, and she was able to push herself to become the person she is today.

As Jeannette tells the story of her upbringing she tells it in a way that allows you to really connect to the ideas that she is trying to present. Jeannette had a very rocky childhood, she would often go hungry and have to rummage through trash to find food, but she didn't let that halt her entire life, and I think that's something that a lot of people can take enormous meaning from. She was able to realize and accept that she had been dealt a bad hand, but that didn't stop her from playing. This message is really able to come across in the way that Jeannette tells her story. She uses a lot of dialogue throughout her book which I feel really gave the reader a chance to feel the way she was feeling. It gave a deeper understanding to how angry she could get in some cases and how poorly she was often treated by her parents and society. People looked down upon Jeannette because of where she came from, and I was really able to understand this interaction better through the times when Walls used dialogue in her book.

This book is very unique in the sense that you are able to hear this story on a first hand basis, directly from the author. Since this is a first hand story there is a lot of bias present, because these are the author's opinions. This bias creates a unique lens for the story, and makes this book a lot more interesting and impactful. I was better able to see and feel what the author was feeling at the time when this bias was present. After reading this book I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is at the reading level to comprehend it. The overall message of this story would be enjoyed by all different types of people, and really gives readers the opportunity to see a new outlook on life.