The Glass Castle

Wednesday, 12 November 2008 03:49

Author: Jeannette Walls
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Year: 2006
Price: About $14.95

In spite of its Walt Disney-esque title, “The Glass Castle” is anything but a fairy tale. Jeannette Walls delivers a heartfelt, sometimes incredible, shocking, and ultimately inspirational memoir. The Walls’ give a whole new meaning to the term “dysfunctional family”. Family is the most important thing for them, and they stick together through thick and thin, they stand up for each other, and they remain together regardless of the circumstances and the situations that would encourage them to do otherwise. Unlike other memoirs, there is not a hint of bitterness in Jeannette Walls’ tone regardless of all the things she went through because of the choices both her parents made.

In “The Glass Castle”, we meet Jeannette’s family: her father Rex- a loving amorous father, intelligent, yet with a restless non conformist soul and an incredible affection for alcohol; her mother: Rose Mary, a frustrated artist, emotionally unstable yet adoring and with the best intentions; her sisters Lori and Maureen; and her brother Brian.

Jeannette Walls tells her story growing up in a nomadic household, where they were always on the go, doing the “skedaddle”- running away from the FBI, the Gestapo and other government agents that according to her father, where after him for trying to uncover government secrets and trying to discover a new energy and oil alternatives. Truth of the matter is, they were running away from social workers and bill collectors.

Of course the kids didn’t know better and believed to hear everything their father told them and every time they moved signified a brand new adventure that involved sleeping under the stars and hunting for food in the dessert. Just when you thought the Walls’ where destined to a nomadic lifestyle, their lives take an unexpected turn as they go back to Rex’s hometown, Welch in West Virginia and finally settle down in a rundown, falling apart, and barely-there shack on Hobart Street.

Sometimes the things Jeannette and her siblings had to go through seem too implausible and outright preposterous that you have to remind yourself that you are indeed reading a memoir.

“The Glass Castle” does not have a happy ending, nor an ending for that matter, but it leaves the reader with a sense of hope. Rex Walls wanted to build a glass castle for his family to live in- the perfect residence, made of glass and powered by the sun and other natural resources, but everything ended in just a dream and some torn down blue prints. In the end you learn that Rex Walls and his impossible glass castle was not physically built, but he was able to build a glass castle inside every one of his children- sometimes you just need a bit of hope, that’s all the glass castle any one needs.

You will be surprised and even shocked at how things turned out for every single member of the Walls family. “The Glass Castle” is a pleasant easy ready that will indeed inspire and enlighten many.