The Glass Castle

By: Jeannette Walls
Genre: Biography
Stars: 4 out of 5
A memoir like this does not come around very often and when they do, strings pull at your heart and you think, this sort of thing happens every day to some families around the country and it is just awful. Jeannette Walls is the second oldest in a family of four with a father who can barely stay sober long enough to keep a steady job and support his family while their mother is a free-spirited woman who does not want the responsibility of taking care of her family. Jeannette and her sisters and brother learn to live on their own, finding food in the school garbage at lunch when they cannot bring their own lunch or afford hot lunch as well as doing as many little jobs as they can to make some sort of incomes for themselves. Even though it is heartbreaking to see these children struggling to survive while their father disappears for days at a time drunk at a bar and their mother is busy painting or expressing her creativity as much as she can and there is never enough money or income to support them all, there are some good memories. For Christmas one year they could not afford presents so their father took them out into the desert under the starry sky and asked them to pick a star and it was theirs. Then there are the bad memories where a reader thinks “Why do these parents even have children” when Jeannette and her brother find a two carat diamond ring thinking it would find their family for at least a few months and after showing their mother all they receive is a self-esteem booster for their mother who instead of pawning the ring decides to wear it. But in the end, Jeannette Walls and her siblings have made better lives for themselves and there is a satisfactory ending to their story.
I decided to read this book after two coworkers were talking about it and one expressed that she could not finish reading the book because it was just sickening the way the parents treated their children. So I was deeply interested to see what this family was put through and I was not disappointed with the disgust I felt from the situations the narrator and her siblings were put through. It also shows the poverty that occurs on a regular basis in the Appalachian Mountains that most individuals forget happens in our country. These coal miner families practically have nothing. All in all this memoir was an eye-opening and fascinating read.