The Glass Castle Book By Jeannette Walls

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1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle is the harrowing tale of Jeannette Wall’s life growing up in poverty with wayward parents. Following the Walls family through the desert to the coal-mining region of West Virginia to the fast-paced life of New York City, this memoir explores the nature of family, loyalty, and tragedy and what it takes to survive together and apart.

Through Mom and Dad's dialogue and action, Walls depicts a fuller portrait of her parents' philosophies toward life. Dad's personal philosophy is further exposed in his attitude toward Jeannette's schooling and his response to Jeannette and Brian's experiment going up in flames. In both cases, Dad embraces learning first. An account of growing up nomadic, starry-eyed, and dirt poor in the ’60s and ’70s, by gossip journalist Walls (Dish, 2000).From her first memory, of catching fire while boiling hotdogs by herself in the trailer park her family was passing through, to her last glimpse of her mother, picking through a New York City Dumpster, Walls’s detached, direct, and unflinching account of her rags-to.

Father Knows Best

Rex Walls was a smart but unruly patriarch. He was a former Air Force pilot and had vast knowledge of science, physics, and engineering. He was known as a man who could fix everything and talk his way out of anything. These traits should have added up to success for Rex and his family, but his inability to settle down and follow the rules added up to the opposite.

During Jeannette’s early childhood, Rex moved the family around the desert like a traveling circus. They’d stop in one small cowpoke town after another, set up a life for a few weeks to months, then pack up and start again somewhere else. Rex said they had to keep moving to stay ahead of the law, which was always on his tail, or wealthy businessmen who wanted to steal his ideas. Rex fancied himself an inventor and always had some scheme or another that was sure to help him strike it rich. In reality, Rex was simply dodging bill collectors.

Striking it rich was Rex’s goal, as was being able to build the Glass Castle for his family, a sprawling home made completely of glass and powered by solar energy. He carried the blueprints everywhere the family went, and Jeannette and her siblings would help him design it.

Jeannette believed in her father and his plans for the future, but until those plans came to fruition, she and her family suffered.

Fend for Yourself

Jeannette’s siblings—an older sister, Lori, a younger brother, Brian, and later, a baby sister, Maureen—were often left to their own devices for sustenance. Their mother, Rose Mary, had a lifelong dream of being an artist and spent most of her time painting and what little money she had on art supplies. Rose Mary’s art was her priority, even over feeding her children.

This priority is what led three-year-old Jeannette to cook hot dogs by herself if she was hungry. She’d stand on a stool and stir the hot dogs in boiling water on the gas stove. One day, while Rose Mary painted in the next room, Jeannette’s dress caught on fire. The flames consumed half of her little body, and she received skin grafts at the hospital. Her parents didn’t believe in western medicine, and after six weeks, Rex showed up and kidnapped her from the burn unit. He said they were checking out Rex Walls style.

Rex could never hold down a job for very long. He either quit or was fired for fighting with his superiors. He was an alcoholic and drank much of the family’s money away. With Rex drunk and unemployed most of the time and Rose Mary focused on her art, there was never much money or guidance in the Walls household.

All throughout her childhood, Jeannette and her siblings staved off starvation. She would rifle through garbage cans at school for discarded lunch items or forage for whatever she could find on the streets. On the rare occasions that there was food in the house, the family would gorge until it was gone. There was no sense of management or rationing when it came to food in her home, and by the end of every month, she’d be back to rummaging for garbage.

Survival of the Fittest

Jeannette and her siblings surmounted great adversity in their lives to become stable professionals. Not only were they always hungry, but they were also always too poor to afford clothes, shoes, and other necessities, like toothpaste, heat, and running water. The children were also victim to many close calls with their safety along the way.

For instance, when Rex and Rose Mary moved the family from Blythe, California to Battle Mountain, Nevada, the kids were forced to ride in the back of the U-Haul truck their parents had rented. On the trip, the doors...

Author: Jeannette Walls | Submitted by: Maria Garcia | 687184 Views | Add a Review

The Glass Castle PDF book by Jeannette Walls Read Online or Free Download in ePUB, PDF or MOBI eBooks. Published in March 2005 the book become immediate popular and critical acclaim in non fiction, autobiography books.

The main characters of The Glass Castle novel are Jeannette Walls, Rex Walls. The book has been awarded with ALA Alex Award (2006), Lincoln Award Nominee (2008) and many others.

One of the Best Works of Jeannette Walls. published in multiple languages including English, consists of 288 pages and is available in Paperback format for offline reading.

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The Glass Castle PDF Details

Author:	Jeannette Walls
Book Format:	Paperback
Original Title:	The Glass Castle
Number Of Pages:	288 pages
First Published in:	March 2005
Latest Edition:	January 17th 2006
Language:	English
Awards:	ALA Alex Award (2006), Lincoln Award Nominee (2008)
Generes:	Non Fiction, Autobiography, Memoir, Biography ,
Main Characters:	Jeannette Walls, Rex Walls, Rose Mary Walls, Maureen Walls, Brian Walls
Formats:	audible mp3, ePUB(Android), kindle, and audiobook.

The book can be easily translated to readable Russian, English, Hindi, Spanish, Chinese, Bengali, Malaysian, French, Portuguese, Indonesian, German, Arabic, Japanese and many others.

Please note that the characters, names or techniques listed in The Glass Castle is a work of fiction and is meant for entertainment purposes only, except for biography and other cases. we do not intend to hurt the sentiments of any community, individual, sect or religion

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