This is undoubtedly one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read. And I have read a lot of memoirs! It helps that Jeannette Walls is incredibly talented, as I already knew from having read The Glass Castle and The Silver Star. But her subject here is really what makes this book stand apart from so many others. “You can’t prepare for everything life’s going to throw at you. And you can’t avoid danger. It’s there. The world is a dangerous place, and if you sit […]
Quick, and Fun, Like Riding a Bike (Not a Bronco)
Half Broke Horses is a “true-life” novel, meaning that Walls took all the stories she had heard and collected about her grandmother and wove them into a narrative, smoothing them into place in a coherent timeline. Since the novel is written in the first person, she admits to assuming her grandmother’s thoughts and exact words, and it’s probably best to just treat the whole thing as probable fiction – beyond that, though, many of the stories kind of defy belief! From learning to fly a […]
A Glass Castle is a Perfect Metaphor
I typically write my reviews in a timely fashion. In fact, I typically have a rule that I can’t start my next book until I write my review. It keeps me honest, up to date and together (because I always want to start the next book). Well, rules went out the window after reading this book. I have no idea what it is about it, but I was altered by The Glass Castle. I didn’t want to write about it, I didn’t want to stop thinking about […]
the Glass Castle is Half Empty
“It’s really not that hard to put food on the table if that’s what you decide to do.” I started to read Jeannette Walls the Glass Castle a couple months ago but had to put it down due to some scenes involving animal neglect. I finally got around to picking it back up and I’m glad I did. The Glass Castle is a hard read (not just because they abandon animals they pick up but can’t care for) but it’s thoroughly engrossing. Jeannette’s father, Rex, […]
“What I do know is that wondering why you survived don’t help you survive.”
I read Jeannette Walls’s excellent memoir, The Glass Castle, a couple months ago. I can see where she borrowed from her (frankly, insane) childhood in The Silver Star, but this novel falls a bit short of her nonfiction. Set in the 1970s, The Silver Star is narrated by 12 year old Bean, whose mother has abandoned her and Bean’s 15 year old sister Liz in order to pursue her dreams of stardom (the mother seems to suffer greatly from something like manic depression). After a few weeks of eating pot […]
“I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”
Jeannette Walls grew up with three siblings, an alcoholic father who drank every dime he made, and an artistic mother who made it very clear to her children that she blamed them for her lack of success. They often moved in the middle of the night — to flee the FBI, according to her father — and spent years in hard poverty. Throughout it all, Jeannette and her siblings banded together to care for each other, and drag each out of the messes that their […]