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Loading... The Glass Castle: A Memoirby Jeannette Walls
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Five star books (24) Family Drama (1) » 46 more Favourite Books (289) Best Young Adult (71) 100 New Classics (11) Female Author (177) Top Five Books of 2013 (320) Carole's List (69) Top Five Books of 2017 (221) Best Family Stories (116) GAL Book Club (5) Books Read in 2016 (2,951) Books tagged favorites (132) USA Road Trip (2) Read These Too (53) Books Tagged Abuse (10) Simon & Schuster (3) Unread books (458) Books on my Kindle (151) No current Talk conversations about this book. ![]() ![]() This book is funny and heartbreaking and matter-of-fact and wild. It's the all-around excellent memoir of Jeannette Walls' childhood and her crazy family... I deeply admire her and (most of) her siblings' ability to rise beyond their circumstances. And, I admit... there were a lot of things in this book that I could see glimpses of in my own family, and even in myself (and the parts I saw in myself weren't the good parts--they were the parts about Jeannette's self-sabotaging artist mother). The whole second half of the book gripped my heart and even... at least for just a moment... made me want to skedaddle to New York. Anyway--definitely worth reading! I never know how to rate a book that was so intensely compelling I couldn't put it down, but that I ultimately found extremely disturbing. This was a well written memoir by the author of Half Broke Horses (anyone read that yet?) about her incredibly dysfunctional family and astonishing childhood. To give it four stars, indicating I "really liked it", feels a little weird.
''The Glass Castle'' falls short of being art, but it's a very good memoir. At one point, describing her early literary tastes, Walls mentions that ''my favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.'' And she has succeeded in doing what most writers set out to do -- to write the kind of book they themselves most want to read. Belongs to Publisher SeriesDiana (35135) Is contained inIs abridged inHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Now a major motion picture from Lionsgate starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, and Naomi Watts. MORE THAN SEVEN YEARS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST The perennially bestselling, extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world's most gifted storytellers. 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. No library descriptions found. |
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