Yay or Nay? 
Yay2! (81%)
Yay2! (81%)
Consensus: Walls is a born storyteller with a life that is worth reading about. Her memoir, “The Glass Castle” in a even handed and beautifully written account of difficult childhood.
Description: Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when … [more]
11 Book Reviews for “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls
- Some people are born storytellers. Some lives are worth telling. The best memoirs happen when these two conditions converge. “In The Glass Castle,” they have.
- Had Frank McCourt’s family stayed in America instead of returning to Ireland, “Angela’s Ashes” might have some of the same stories Walls lived to tell…. The book dares us not to love Rex Walls, at least at first, as the brilliant storyteller father who strings his children along with stories of the glass castle he will build for them one day.
- What’s best is the deceptive ease with which she makes us see just how she and her siblings were convinced that their turbulent life was a glorious adventure…. Even as she describes how their circumstances degenerated … Walls is notably evenhanded and unjudging.
Published the 13th day of March, 2005 in The New York Times | Reviewed by Francine Prose | Full Review
- Walls never turns her parents into monsters and instead emphasizes their humanity…. Though there are many memoirs that describe hardscrabble childhoods, Walls has joined the company of writers such as Mary Karr and Frank McCourt who have been able to transform their sad memories into fine art.
- Walls … is a dead-on, dry-eyed portraitist, both of others and of herself. She writes without a drop of self-pity, and she never makes the mistake of allowing her parents to become monsters: they’re always flawed yet recognizably human, desperately trying to be themselves and instead destroying everyone around them.
- Walls avoids drawing conclusions and chooses not to strive for transcendence, opting instead for the straight story…. As “The Glass Castle” nears its close, however, it becomes increasingly clear that while the particulars of this extraordinary childhood make for a fairly compelling tale, nothing lasting will be revealed.
- Walls’s journalistic bare-bones style makes for a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect. A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story.
- With a fantastic storytelling knack … Walls doesn’t pull her punches.
- Shocking, sad, and occasionally bitter, this gracefully written account speaks candidly, yet with surprising affection, about parents and about the strength of family ties – for both good and ill.
- Walls has a God-given knack for spinning a yarn, and “The Glass Castle” is nothing short of spectacular.
Published the 8th day of March, 2005 in Entertainment Weekly | Reviewed by Nicholas Fonseca | Full Review
- It’s a rare family memoir that packs all the power of a Charles Dickens novel. The adults must be as cruel as they are foolish, the children as resourceful as they are wise. Yet the characters in Jeannette Walls’s best-selling 2005 memoir, “The Glass Castle,” possessed all those Dickensian qualities.
Published the 17th day of October, 2009 in The Washington Post | Reviewed by Marie Arana | Full Review
Other books you might also like:
 |
Average Score: 65%
 (8 Reviews) |
 |
Average Score: 79%
(25 Reviews) |
 |
Average Score: 50%
 (2 Reviews) |
 |
Average Score: 71%
(8 Reviews) |
 |
Average Score: 74%
(18 Reviews) |
