Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The book is Jeannette Walls' remembrance of her childhood where she was at turns abused and neglected by her parents Rex and Rose Mary. I was filled with anger and disbelief at her parents and pity towards the author, although by the end of the book I felt an even more profound sadness for the author as an adult. More about that below. A memoir seems to free the author from being precise and Walls takes full advantage of this. No dates, no maps, no confirmation of even the simplest claims like Rex being an Air Force pilot, and no pictures save the idealized wedding photo of Rex and Rose Mary. Oh! how much the book would have gained if we could have seen Rose Mary's portraits of her kids. The style of the book is unremarkable; although Walls has an annoying penchant for hyperbole, her favorite qualifier is always, as in "Everyone always turned and stared at Dad". The vocabulary is unchallenging and the imagery never goes beyond cliche. At one point, even the author recognizes the banality of her own simile and tries to cover herself by admitting her giving Rex stitches was sewing meat. The memoir is told in 5 parts, the first section occurs at some point in the late 80's and describes the author's embarrassed meeting with Rose Mary in New York City. The next two sections are the bulk of the memoir and are told in what appears to be chronological order and cover her early childhood from 1963-1970 in the Great American Desert and 1970-1978 in a sooty, dying coal town in Appalachia. Section 4 covers the period 1978-1987 or so in New York City as the author escapes Rex and Rose Mary only to have them follow her. The last section, as brief as Section 1, shoots past Section 1 in time and describes a family Thanksgiving gathering where the author reflects on the past covered in Section 2. The story telling is merely the chronological chain of anecdotes; the root cause of each anecdote is either Rex's alcoholism, Rose Mary's childishness, or the kids being ill-equipped to fend for themselves. Sometimes the writing has a thrown together feel, I think of the anecdote of the cornered river rat where the author introduces the dog to us because she needs it to kill the rat by the end of the sentence. In another place the author needed to move into an apartment so out of the blue she introduces her boyfriend of several years, Eric, so she can move in with him. Eric is a lightly sketched plot-enabler, not a person; the author never describes her relationship with him or shares any adventures they had together. Although the author marries Eric, only his apartment is used to construct her self-image and thereby gets more attention than its owner. I applaud how the author borrows a technique of Dickens which is to contrast the adult who acts like a child with real children who have to assume adult duties. And there is a splendid series of comic anecdotes in Appalachia, where each attempt to improve their lives fails. They pay the electric bill but are shocked by faulty wiring; patch the roof with tarpaper but it still leaks; dig the foundation for the glass castle then fill it with garbage; paint half the house but cant find a ladder to finish; buy a canned ham but it rots without refrigeration and breeds maggots; forage for food but poke weed itches and tomato cans explode; go to forage spilled coal but only collect half a bucket; buy an iguana but it freezes to death; wash clothes for the first time in months but they freeze stiff; find a diamond ring but Rose Mary takes it; and so on. I believe the author borrowed this literary technique from Wile E. Coyote. So much for aesthetic value. Let's turn to the moral value of the book where I find the book fails just as the kids failed in their attempts to act as adults while still kids. Proust wrote, The true paradises are the paradises we have lost. Walls's past is not a paradise yet there is still a powerful compulsion by Walls to make it one. So in my mind she must modify Proust. She enlists Dylan Thomas in this effort, and if I interpret the book's motto correctly, Wall's believes it was Rex's promise of a paradise, expressed most vividly by the metaphor of the Glass Castle, and not the actual world that he provided for her, that was the remembered paradise of her youth. Wall's then runs together the promise with Rose Mary's claim that there is something good in everyone and that good, no matter how trivial, has magical powers to redeem a person, no matter how evil. Even Hitler has a redeeming feature. Rose Mary's juvenile philosophy allows the author to redeem her father because he made the promise. It's a beautiful sentiment; and indicative of the mental gymnastics the author has to perform in order to make the case for her parents. In contrast, here is another way to think about the book. The Glass Castle is the story of a little girl. She is neglected by her parents, and ignored by her siblings who are busy trying to survive themselves (and in any event they are ill-equipped to raise her). She has to rely on the handouts of neighbors to eat. She grows up unnoticed and unappreciated. She moves to New York City only to have her parents follow her there. She lives with her mom and wracked with drugs stabs her and is sent to a mental hospital upstate. None of her siblings stay in touch with her. Of course this sad story, without redemption or grace, is baby sister Maureen's. No blowhard talk by a violent and cruel alcoholic about a glass castle is going to make a paradise out of what happened to Maureen. The author survived; and lucky was the author. Walls could easily have been burned to death at age 3; or suffered from disease caused by malnutrition; or shot herself with Rex's pistol. Maureen (and poor, forgotten Mary Charleen!) wasn't so lucky and her life was destroyed by her awful parents. Rex's claim that because of how the author turned out he must have done something right, is a misleading use of cause and effect. He didnt do anything right, his daughter achieved what she did only because she was lucky. What whelms me with sadness is the author's denial of her parent's real role---she says she went to New York to escape Welch, not to escape her parents; she blames herself for Maureen's fate, not her parents; Rex is remembered as an exciting father who is the subject of happy toasts after he passes and Maureen's voice not being part of the toast is not mentioned by our author. If this was a novel, such an obfuscating or unreliable narrator would be understandable, but in a true story there is instructional value in having a clear eyed assessment of what happened. Maureen is a real person who has suffered and is suffering today and there needs to be some accountability for that. And I am saddened to see the author is still helping her parents evade accountability and I feel so sorry for her inability recognize her role in protecting them from realizing their cruelty and destructiveness. To be fair, perhaps Rose Mary can escape censure because she has about as much sense as a squirrel; but we expect much more from Rex, who "everybody thought was a genius". It's unfortunate Jeannette Walls squandered whatever chance writing this book could have afforded her to heal herself. There is still time for Al-Anon.