What is your first childhood memory? Your favourite? Your strongest? What if your first memory is of setting yourself on fire in a trailer while cooking hotdogs at the age of three because your mother thought you were old enough to deal with your own meals? What if your favourite memories are of loading up in the family car in the middle of the night to go on an "adventure" because your parents had to leave town? Or if your strongest memories are of rooting through the school garbage for lunch or wandering through town trying to find your dad in a local bar because he hasn’t been home for three days?
My childhood memories include ski weekends, cottage summers, hockey house league with my father coaching, overstuffed Christmas stockings and bellies, back to school shopping, kick-the-can, Brownies and Guides.
But the memories of Jeannette Walls 
are those listed above. These details and many more are retold in her beautifully touching and unsentimental memoir, The Glass Castle.
Jeannette’s parents are a disturbing combination of free spirits and stubborn resistors. They don’t belive in rules, structure, and most forms or pressures of organized society, but they love their children very much.
When the four children are young, this non-conformity manifests itself in a nomadic lifestyle that borders on the unsafe, but as the children get older, money becomes more elusive and Rex Walls’ drinking escalates, Rose Mary and Rex selfishly drag their children to a level of poverty and subsistence with which few of us are familiar.
There are many opportunities for this book to become a "Parent Dearest" for the unfamous, or an emotional diatribe of a family gone wrong, but the matter of fact prose and attention to detail make it this memoir so much more. The Walls children are some of the most riveting and determined characters in literature. And Jeannette’s love for her mother and adoration for her father resound throughout every painful detail, even as she begins to realize her parents no longer have the best interest of their children at heart.
The Glass Castle is not a silly summer dock read, but it is a must read nonetheless.
Wow, I’ll have to pick this one up for sure. It’s amazing the things people can go through in their childhoods and yet still manage to overcome the odds.
This is one of my favourite books of the last decade (I must be getting old if I’m describing books from a certain decade in my life!!). The author did an amazing job of describing the love in her family without romanticizing the realities of their poverty, her parents alcoholism or mental illness.
I LOVED this book. I read it in about 3 days and was so engrossed I struggled to put it down. It is hard to believe that this was really her life. I love the fact that she is not self-righteous or pathetic either. Awesome read. I highly recommend it.