Review: The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

American journalist, writer, and magazine editor David Remnick once said, “The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy.” In the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls the main character and author of the book tells of her crazy and adventurous life she experienced with her not so ordinary family. This quote relates to The Glass Castle, because like it states, life is full of both tragedies and beauty which is exactly what Jeannette experienced growing up with her free spirited and non-conformative parents. Walls is able to express her main purpose of the book that life is a mix of good and bad times through imagery, tone, and pathos.

Many people react differently based on the way they have been brought up or taught. In the Glass Castle by Jeannette Wall, it has been portrayed to the readers that the response to a problem can either have a positive effect on a community and or a negative effect on the community. In the book, The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls was seen as live a nonrestrictive life ever since she was three. Jeannette makes a statement that you can still be successful in life even if you had been raised in an irregular family. Through the eyes of Jeannette Walls, it can be said that a person's drive and passion can achieve that point of success.

“If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim”(66). Jeannette Walls, the author of The Glass Castle, became the best swimmer in all types of water, rough, deep, shallow, calm, and stormy. The book The Glass Castle is an autobiography about Jeanette’s, traumatic life growing up in an alcoholic and abusive household. Rose Mary and Rex Walls raised their children with tough love and never spoonfed them. Jeanette, the second oldest child, ended up facing multiple deathly and scarring situations during her childhood. Through all the adversity, Jeannette Walls learns that forgiveness and self sufficiency are key for success, which demonstrates, which demonstrates the power of independence and mental strength’s ability to create life-changing

Jeannette Walls is an American writer in journalist who found success in New York City, most notably writing a gossip column for MSNBC in which she details the effects of gossip in politics. She published her memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005. The book spent 261 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In it, Walls recounts her childhood while growing up in an unstable family with her father and mother, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori, and her younger brother and sister, Brian and Maureen. Rex and Rose Mary could not settle down and constantly uprooted their family of six to different locations in the southwest region of America. Neither parent could keep a job and struggled to feed and put a roof over their heads. In the novel, Walls views her parents as irresponsible because it rarely seems as though Rex and Rose Mary genuinely want to work and make money to support the family. They thrive off their sense of adventure, as they drive all over the country in a rundown car, looking for their latest shack to pile their family into, usually without running water, heat, or indoor plumbing. Walls will tell the story of her childhood through a series of pivotal moments that ultimately shape her opinion of her parents and lead her to a successful career in New York City.

In order to create a building, you must first make sure the foundation is durable. Without a sturdy foundation, the structure won’t be able to stand up properly causing it to come crumbling down. Roofs are supported by pillars, wagons with wheels, and the human body with legs. Without pillars, wheels, or legs, the entire machine wouldn’t be able to do what it’s meant to do. In order to create a castle out of a material so fragile such as glass, it is crucial for the base to be as robust as possible. The ideals of a mighty foundation can be seen in the structure of a family. The parents are the bases that have the duty to make their children reach the clouds. Sons and daughters are a result of the nurturing

Jeannette Walls, the author of The Glass Castle, creates an overall universal message, or theme, that family is more important than money because family lasts forever; She does this by including the fact that the mom didn’t sell family owned land just for money. The Walls family lives a run-down life moving from place to place practically homeless. Towards the end of the memoir, a big secret is revealed: the mother, Rose Mary Walls, inherited land valued at about one million dollars, but instead of selling this land for money she decides to keep it and rent it out for a little extra money. A million dollars would be great to have and could provide Rose Mary’s children, Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen, with healthy food, a nice home, and

Jeannette Walls,subject and author of The Glass Castle, includes several social issues that she and her family come across daily during her childhood. However, the three most important social issues the memoir addresses is poverty, alcoholism, and child abuse. These social issues affect a large amount of children with their emotions and social development.

Reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls can help build a student’s resilience especially if that student is in a tough moment in his or her life. The Glass Castle shows that Jeannette the main character suffered from a life she now looks back on and did not like. Her life turned upside down after living alone in a house that was falling apart and she had no food to sustain herself, she moves to New York with her sister Lori, in the hope of finding a better life. There is going to be motivation based on being consistent in a daily task that students would be faced with. Being invested in their education can help students become hard workers to build up their resilience. Having a desire to achieve the goal that the students has set for themselves.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir written in first person and length in chapters that illustrates Jeanette's life in her own words and experiences. Born in Phoenix, Arizona on April 21, 1960 by her parents Rex Walls and Rose Mary Walls. Jeannette has three siblings, Lori, Brian, and Maureen. She is currently married to John Taylor and has written a novel; Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, and a memoir, The Glass Castle.

Hardships are terrible, but they are a normal part of everybody’s life. No matter the hardship, anybody can recover. In her memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls tells a true story of her unconventional childhood. She journeys the readers through her nomadic and dysfunctional family lifestyle. Her parents—the artistic, inattentive Rose Mary and the intelligent, alcoholic Rex—neglect their children and fail to provide for them adequately. Walls learns how to care for herself at an early age. Growing up in such a dysfunctional family, it would be no surprise if Walls would have turned out just as wrecked as her parents, but Walls was able to rise above and accomplish a successful life. It is through the sharing of her own personal success, that Wall’s demonstrates you don’t have to be a product of your circumstances you can shape your own future.

Jeannette Walls never had a ideal childhood. Growing up, she was caring for herself and her siblings, they stuck together. Her parents' actions caused various burdens and embarrassment for their children. In the book The Glass Castle Walls' parents were not perfect, but she still showed compassion and love towards them. She defended her family name and cared for them.“But I could never enjoy the room without worrying about Mom and Dad huddled on a sidewalk gate somewhere”(Walls 4).

In the memoir by Jeannette Walls, “The Glass Castle”, the author shares the bittersweet and slightly humorous story of her dysfunctional family and destitute upbringing. Walls grows up with a family that is always on the move and stricken by hunger. In the memoir, Walls writes about her memories of moving from one place to another with her eccentric mother, her alcoholic but intelligent father, and her three other siblings. Walls used language that was quickly understood to describe the happenings in the book. When I read the part where Rex brought Jeannette to a roadside bar so that he could earn the money that he owed her, I felt so disgusted and angry at the father.

The norm of humans is to glance over the parts that make ourselves look bad, while embellishing details to make others seem inept or incompetent. Walls however, told the truth. She did not want our pity or our condemnation of her parents; instead she wanted her story to be told the way it happened. When Walls was eight, she had an altercation with another child, “I yanked the pistol out of Lori’s hand, aimed low, and pulled the trigger. I was too carried away to hold the gun the way Dad had taught me, and the recoil nearly pulled my shoulder out of its socket” (88). The vast majority of people would not put an incident like that into their memoir, but Walls did. During Walls’ high school years, she got a job working at a Jeweler's shop. One of the things that were on display were watches. Walls had never had owned a watch and she really wanted one of these watches, “The next day, when Mr. Becker went off to the Mountaineer, I opened the display case and took out the four-band watch. I slipped it into my handbag and rearranged the remaining watches to cover the gap” (216). Even though the Statute of Limitations on petty larceny had long since expired by the time she published her memoir, very few people was confess to a crime like

There are many ways to cope with events that happen in life, some are positive and some are negative. In The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, Jeannette tells her story of her unconventional family and how she copes with events that occur in her life. The story starts when she is a young child and how her family is not homeless, they are free spirits and their outlook on life is that everything is an adventure. However, as time progresses and she gets older, she starts to see how this is not how she wants to live her life and that she wants more for herself. Along the way the Walls family comes in contact with different situations that could be harmful to them and how they cope with such situations. The way people cope with things varies from being negative to positive; how people cope with things really shapes their lives in the long run.

In The Glass Castle some characters seek freedom from society’s rules while others seek the comforts and security that come from a “normal” life. What is more important to children? Freedom or security? I am convinced that what matters most to children is security. They may seek freedom but to them freedom means running around. However, running around leads to chaos. Then chaos can lead to danger and when children feel endangered or they’ve fallen and got hurt they seek safety. Even if they live in a stable or peaceful household they want to feel safe and secure and, especially children living how Jeannette and her siblings did, want security.