Monday, January 16, 2012

52 Books in 52 Weeks

Book Three: The Glass Castle 
by Jeannette Walls

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 is truly astonishing - a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.

Hard to put it down once I'd started!

Jeannette Walls lives in Virginia and is married to the writer John Taylor.  The Glass Castle won the 2005 Elle Readers' Prize, the 2006 American Library Association Alex Award, a Christopher Award, a Books for a Better Life Award, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was more than three years on the New York Times Bestseller List.

1 comment:

Caryl said...

Wasn't this a fascinating memoir? A friend recommended it to me, and although I was wary at first, I became captivated within the first few pages. She paints such complete portraits of her parents - that had to be a challenge.