The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle
By: Jeannette Walls

Giving reviews of memoirs is always a difficult task. It's hard to criticize a book about someone's life. I have a hard time separating the content from the literary aspects so I suppose you can take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Other reviewers haven't liked the choppiness of the writing style but I actually liked that part. I liked the snippets and short stories because I feel like that's how memories work. We don't remember things in one long story. We have certain events that stick with us and those are the things that shape our character, demeanor, and in Jeannette's case- her resilience. I think the jumpiness of the scenes is necessary in this story and essential to describing her life and memories.

Others thought it was ridiculous that she could remember so much, especially in her younger years. And I admit it's hard to know what is all true from those earlier memories, but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and am assuming some of the stories are shared from her other siblings. Her older sister especially most likely filled in some of those gaps.

My negative review is primarily based on the absolute disgust of her parents' selfishness. Jeannette depicts her parents as pretty intelligent human beings as they did so much 'teaching' at home, but I find that so hard to believe that intelligent people like that could live such dysfunctional and illogical lives. They had the means to provide for themselves and their family and they deliberately choose not to. Their oldest child was virtually blind and they refused to get her glasses- that makes NO sense. How can they be so selfish as to deny their child the right to SEE things?! I spent a lot of my time fuming as I read this. I, like other readers, have a hard time understanding Jeanette's somewhat cavalier attitude toward her past in the end of the book. After everything her parents put her and her siblings through, I find it very hard to see her parents not held accountable for what they did but simply glossed over and excused as 'unique.' It's not unique, it's wrong and should not happen.

I guess I would have liked to see more of Jeannette's process in getting to the place of forgiveness, grace, and redemption. There is obviously always a place for those things in every situation, and it would only be through God's grace that I would have been able to forgive parents like that, but if that is the case here, I think it would have been valuable to the reader to walk through Jeannette's process of acknowledging her past for the disgrace it was and forgiving her parents for the things they did. There was a little bit of it, but not enough for me to feel good about where the family is at by the end of the book.

Yes, Jeannette was brave to write this. Yes, the literary aspects of this book were great. But I can't give more than a brief nod because in my mind, anything more is somehow validating her parents' selfishness and I can't be a part of that. This is all my heart will allow me to do.