" The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.
The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered."
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls was the second of two books that I had to read for school. I hadn't read too many memoirs before, so I wasn't too sure how to react to it-- should I be analyzing the text, looking in the story for themes and motifs? After a few chapters I understood that I should just be reading for the story, which wasn't bad. Jeannette Walls talks about her rough upcoming, but constantly through the book I was asking, so what? I didn't see any clear ideas showing through that really encompassed the whole story. Jeannette Walls writes well though, her chapters only one or two pages, almost like articles. You get a really good idea of the weaknesses of her parents, and she displays them as people, not glorifying them through a child's eyes, but not villainizing them because of how they raised her.
I don't think I would really recommend this book-- I found the whole thing kind of sad, and didn't take anything away from it except knowing about a random persons life. 2/5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment