Author: Jeanette Walls
Number of Pages: 288
Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ Review: I absolutely loved this book
“You either sink or you swim” This quote is phrased throughout the book The Glass Castle. We see a family torn through the deprivation and hardship that life offers. Over and over again looking for hope in even the darkest situations. Jeanette Walls tells her childhood story through this heart wrenching memoir showing just how forlorn a childhood can be with an alcoholic father who repeatedly fails the family. However, alongside this idea we see the opposing side of a story where a young girl fights through the hardships of life, as she fights to grasp certain life lessons most people never come to learn. She wrangles around these struggles coming out on the better end.
In this story we start out the book in the more present with a woman who sees her mother and is scared of the thought of talking to her. After this we flashback through the years of her childhood. A young girl who idolizes her father and the ideas of a dauntless and adventurous life. The family is constantly moving from town to town in hopes to one day strike it rich. Little do they know that the one thing keeping them from this dream is their father Rex. We read through the years of her life and watch this young girl grow and have to mature in such a fast way in order to clean up after the messes that her parents leave. She goes through fires and burns, to beatings from bullies and starving because of the life that her parents have set out for the family.
The author Jeanette Walls adds an entirely new level of writing into this book through the emotion she adds, rather than just reading about this shocking childhood and events in her life. She adds so much ethos and pathos and emotion into the book drawing you in. This technique that she uses is what allowed this book to win awards. You feel as though you were there. Allowing you to connect and relate to the characters in the book in many different ways. She uses language and terms such as “doing the skedaddle” to connect it back to the past. She also creates themes and life lessons allowing you to reflect on the lives of the Walls family. What makes this book so unique as well is the fact that it is a true story which is insane to think about. Which I feel allows the reader to draw into the book and compare or contrast to it. Alongside with the emotion and the way that everything the characters feel in the book, weigh on you in a way that you can feel what they are going through.
I would one hundred percent recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a true story of hardship and life that allows them to feel emotion throughout the entire book and learn many themes and lessons that they can take into their own lives.
This is an incredible book and I would recommend for everyone to read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment