"The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls is a woman whose early life was very different from most of us in a large number of ways. First of all, her parents Rex and Rose Mary had three other children, and during Jeannette’s early years the family lived as nomads, traveling from desert towns to mountain camps. 

Rex was a very brilliant man who taught his children a variety of different things such as physics and geology, as well as how one should embrace life without fears. Rose Mary was a painter, and contrarily to Rex she did not take well to being a provider for the family, referring to herself as being an “excitement addict”.

However, at some point the money ran out as well as the desire to keep on living like fugitives, and so the family settled into a West Virginia mining town where the family troubles truly began to show. Rex’s alcohol habits started to become harder and harder to please as he did everything in his power to escape his reality, which included stealing grocery money and disappearing for days on end. 

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Book cover)
On her end, Rose Mary would bear little interest in the lives of her children, feeling as if they are holding her back. This left Jeannette as well as her brothers and sisters to fend for themselves and make it through this world, until one day they finally got enough resources to leave their home.

For a long time widely-acclaimed author Jeannette Walls has been hiding her roots to the best of her abilities. The Glass Castle is basically her telling the story she has been trying to keep under wraps for many years now.

Apart from offering simply a series of descriptive statements about her life, she truly reflects on the people she met and the events she had been through offering some very valuable insight not only into her life, but also into human nature in general.


Jeannette Walls (Author)

Jeannette Walls


Jeannette Walls is a former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and a reputed American author whose magnum opus (so far at least) turned out to be The Glass Castle, a memoir of her own childhood. It sold over 2.7 million copies and has received the Christopher Award, the American Library Association's Alex Award, as well as the Books for Better Living Award.

Her fascination with reminiscing of the past didn't end there, as she came back in 2009 in full force to publish Half Broken Horses, based on her grandmother's life.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

“The Locked Door” by Freida McFadden – Roots of a Lost Innocence

Image
  Freida McFadden has been quietly writing some exciting and original thrillers in her spare time from being a practicing physician, and The Locked Door is one of her latest offering in the genre.  It tells the story of Nora, a surgeon and daughter of a serial killer now in jail, who sees her life assaulted from the dark as someone begins to recreate her father's work with the exact same signature.
Read more

“The Lost Colony” by A.G. Riddle – A New Home Among the Stars

Image
A.G. Riddle's Long Winter Trilogy Series is one many of us will remember for the amazing story it brings of humanity's last stand against an overwhelming enemy in times of hopelessness. In The Lost Colony , the third book in the series, we follow James and Emma on their own respective struggles as humanity tries to settle itself on a new planet with an unseen danger none could have foreseen.
Read more

“Winter World” by A.G. Riddle – Ice Age from the Void

Image
A.G. Riddle is a true literary explorer seeking to push humanity to its limits and beyond, setting them on a desperate collision course with something beyond its understanding in Winter World . With a sudden ice age dawning on humanity entire swathes of land become uninhabitable and people begin dropping like flies, with anarchy reigning supreme. Looking to the stars for a miraculous solution, the remnants of humanity find a massive mysterious object floating near Mars ...whatever it is, our civilization's hopes of survival rest entirely in its hands.
Read more

“The Girl on the Stairs” by Barry Ernest – The Small Thorn you Can’t Ignore

Image
Girl on the Stairs , by Barry Ernest and with a foreword written by David Lifton, is an exploration of one specific aspect of the JFK assassination. More precisely, it looks into what a little girl by the name of Victoria Adams saw on that day while standing in the staircase of the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald was supposedly making his escape.  Actually, it is more about what she didn’t see than what she did see. Victoria was on the staircase Oswald supposedly used, at the exact same time he supposedly used it. If he were to be there, even the little girl she was, Victoria would have noticed a nervous man quickly running down the stairs. However, she says that on that day, she was alone there, with nobody to be found, especially Oswald.
Read more

“Three Comrades” by Erich Maria Remarque – The Other Side of the Barricade

Image
The two World Wars have been documented, discussed and depicted from virtually every perspective imaginable, ranging from small children caught in a crossfire all the way the leaders of each country. However, it seems that here is a startlingly small amount of attention dedicated to the small hiatus period between the two wars, a time during which many changes came to pass in Germany in a very short amount of time.
Read more