Book Review: The Glass Castle

This was a book I picked up completely by accident in at the bookstore. I’m incredibly glad I did.

The book is a detailed, beautifully written and moving memoir that elicits automatic sympathy, and yet Walls writes without self-pity. She seems to stay true to the story and include as much of the background as we need to picture. And indeed, she makes it very easy for the reader to be able to see through their mind’s eye everything she’s talking about. The book also highlights, to me at least, that while we are all born to different advantages and situations, children are, at the core, similar. They fight and laugh and are more resilient than most people give them credit for. It follows Walls from the age of three, when she accidentally sets herself on fire cooking hot dogs, up till the years just before publishing the memoir.

Jeannette Walls’ story is inspirational, without trying to be. I didn’t even think I was going to use that word in this review, but it is. A stark contrast to the other biography I read this summer - John Grogan’s The Longest Trip Home - which I did not enjoy at all. This book, whether a biography or not, is an enthralling read.